nurseprnRN

The MGH program was one of the first of its kind in the country, and is excellent. Boston is a GREAT college town. Downside: The cost of living is very high here and the Old Farmer's Almanac projects that we'll have a worse winter than last year :).

We have no idea what OCCC is, other than the educated guess that it's a community college. The answers you seek should be readily available to you if you call the nursing program office.

Thank you, ixchel, for being nice to an old bat. :flwrhrts:

If they draw blood they DEFINITELY need to know ... about precautions for EVERY patient, no exceptions, no exceptional circumstances.

Ya beat me to it. :) LOVE GomerBlog.

Try Khan Academy on YouTube-- they have some great video tutoring that can help you get it!

I like your plan to take no more than 2 classes at a time and one over the summer. I hear your eagerness to get this the heck DONE. You also need to consider that nursing school admissions are VERY competitive; a little extra time send in rocking out prerequisites will translate into sooner admission to better schools, so totally worth the time. Also, fewer classes at a time means more time to really learn the material, and you WILL be held to a standard of having a good working knowledge of all your prerequisites. The other consideration is the money. The longer you can hold onto your full time, well-paying job, the more money you can sock away to live on when you are too busy with nursing to earn it. We see students here all the time who have incurred huge loans for tuition and living expenses, and then can't find work that pays them enough to live on plus make their loan payments. CNA is useful, and in my opinion probably a lot more so than phlebotomy and certainly more so than EKG at this remove, so save those for way later when you figure out whether you are learning them well enough in school already. Working as a CNA for even a few months, perhaps over the last summer before you enroll in the nursing program, will serve you well in your first semester, when the nursing program related to patient handling and care motor skills is largely CNA-level anyway -- you'll be ahead of your classmates who are still squeamish about and obsessing over bodies and personal boundaries and touching, so you can focus on the actual nursing skills of communication, assessment, and planning care better than they will. Nice to meet you! Welcome to AllNurses! Stay in touch!

I look at this as the reversal that comes of aging. You know, remember when you were a really young teen and you had to wear those stupid pads until you learned to steal your mother's Tampax? Then they invented pantie liners for the occasional overflow? Well. I'm clearly not going back to Tampax, but the pantie liners have re-entered my life. Started with the really thin ones and am now up to the slightly thicker ones, but not the fat ones with wings yet. Even so, I imagine in another fifteen or so years I'll be regressed all the way to diapers.

Without reading this whole thing again I can't tell if I already answered this, but this attitude is not good for two reasons: 1) You are completely unable to be certain of ANYONE's status regards blood-borne illness of any kind. Period. 2) Therefore, if you are "a little more careful" with only the ones who are diagnosed, and not exercising the same level of practice regarding universal precautions with the others, you 2a) put yourself at increased risk of infection and 2b) by telling your CNAs that, you decrease their commitment to UP and therefore increase their risk of infection

Never, never, never stand around in a group at the end of the hall talking. Never, never, never carry your cell phone while you're on the floor. Leave it home or lock it up in a locker. I mean it. Cut the cord. If you need to look something up, ask your nurse where the manual or the binder or the book is for that in the nurses' station or how to do it on the floor computer; she may even take pity on you and give you the answer. :) Do not ever let anybody find you sitting in the nursing lounge studying or doing homework. You study at home or in the library. In the hospital, you're there to learn a lot about patient care. You ought to have come prepared, and you can make notes for yourself to look up new stuff when you get home. When your patient goes on a field trip to xray or GI lab or PT or anywhere, go along and soak up all you can. If your instructor gives you the chance to spend a day or two in a different place, TAKE IT. Fun places where you can learn a lot you can apply anywhere: cardiopulmonary rehab, diabetes clinic, GI lab, PACU, ortho clinic, inpatient psych or geripsych, shadowing the infection control nurse specialist or the wound/ostomy specialist ... Write a nice thank you note to your preceptor or any nurse that is particularly helpful to you, and say exactly why. Make a copy for the nurse manager so s/he knows who's doing a good job at that. It's also reinforcing so that nurse will be good (or better) for students the next time. Bring snacks for the whole staff (don't forget night shift!) on your last day. Smile a lot!

I dunno. I sense a great attitude and a literate way of describing your outlook on life. I think you'll do fine wherever you go...if you love critical care-types of things, take every chance you get a a student to peek in to the ICU or NICU (less heavy lifting, more like cats than Great Danes), meet the staffs, take your senior practicum in a critical care unit and excel at it. For most new grads we recommend that they take whatever job they can get, because it's hard to find jobs. It is really not too soon to start cultivating relationships, though. Work a day a week as a CNA and volunteer to help in the ICUs. Get known. Soak up everything you can. Looking forward to seeing you go through school! Good luck! (Here's my experience with vet ICU from an old thread about whether it's appropriate to call them "vet nurses." ... bless you guys... Our Naja kitty squatted and gave me a bloody sample on the floor, and having seen this before I took her to our vet and reported she had a UTI. He stuck her for a urine sample and gave her an antibiotic. Next day he called to say the urine C&S came back clean, and we shrugged and went back to life. Alas, Naja almost went on to die, as she had a rare side effect to this very common antibiotic and almost infarcted her bowel. After a stat CAT scan (really) she had emergent surgery that night by a guy that reminded me of a pedi surgeon-- great huge guy with immense hands and a heart of gold. "Oh, I love calicos!" he said. "I'll take good care of her." But he didn't know if she'd live. We went to visit her in the ICU the next afternoon. She had a staple line from her pubis to xiphoid, drains, and a little kitty PICC line in a shaved foreleg for blood draws, IVs and pain meds so she didn't have to get stuck all the time. She was wrapped in a pedi-sized BAIR hugger and in an oxygen cage. Do not ask what all this cost us. And those nurses were great-- I watched them check her SpO2, take vs, give her IV pain med before moving her, turn her from side to side, check her urine specific gravity, and pet her and croon to her all the time. I don't know what they had to learn in school, but whatever it was, they knew exactly what they were doing and looked like they'd be perfectly at home in any PICU I've ever seen. So yes, in the vet context, they're nurses. I bless that surgeon but I also bless the nurses, and told them so, nurse to nurse, how much I appreciated their skills. I was able to talk shop so well with them that they assessed me as being able to manage home care a day sooner than usual for this sort of thing; I took her home with the big collar, a few meds, a schedule to give them, a med sheet to chart them, and dressing supplies. She was in step-down (confined to our bedroom) for three weeks. I took out her staples at 8 days; I saw she wasn't paying any attention at all to her staple line if I let her have the collar off to eat, so after a few trials of observation I let her keep it off. Good patient, adherent to treatment plan. She's fine now, two years later, catching rabbits and cuddling with us whenever she wants, very communicative and a pushy cat. We're glad to have her. )

Part of your faculty's reason for giving you this assignment is to get you to go out there and speak to an RN face to face. A big email blast is not a substitute for shoe leather. AN is not Google. See, in nursing, you have to learn to speak to a lot of people you would not otherwise encounter; you might find yourself out of your comfort zone. This is part of nursing, a huge part. An anonymous respondent online, well, you don't really know who we are, do you? We could be the truck driving guy living next door for all you know. So if all you do about learning new things is "Go to the keyboard and hit send," then you are limiting your chances of actual learning a valuable skill you will need all your working life. Also, your faculty will not be impressed by your citation of an anonymous nurse on the internet. That said: Where will you find a nurse? Think outside the (computer) box. Local hospital: go to the staff development/inservice education office and ask one of them. They value education and will be happy to chat or to hook you up with someone who is. Go to the public health department downtown. They're in the phone book. Ditto. Go to the local school and ask to speak to a school nurse. Or your college health clinic. Ditto. Go to a local clinic / physician/NP office. Ditto. Go to the local jail and ask to speak to the nurse there. Ditto. One of the really cool things about doing this assignment is that you will find that there are MANY MANY different ways to fill 12 hours for an RN. Take me, for example-- I don't work in a hospital at all, and I've been working all day, and I do things like read records, coordinate care, do patient teaching, research costs, help patients with navigating the health care maze, edit other people's writing, and run an editorial board. And I let the neighbor's dog out to pee and bought a birthday card. :) Notice all of these say, "Go to..." and not "Email..." Remember that part about meeting new people face to face and comfort zone. Go!

Oh, and one more thing. Being "scared" or "terrified" is not a functional way to go through life. It will serve you especially poorly in your first year of practice. Telling yourself you're terrified / scared to death / panic-stricken is something we hear all the time here, but is a poor message to give yourself. Those words and their cousins are not your friends; banish them from your vocabulary and they will never bother you again. Lose the word "scared" from your self-descriptive vocabulary (including your handle here!). I mean it. Never use it again, and if you feel it coming on, immediately replace it with the word "challenged" or "excited!" Challenges you can rise to and meet, but fear is a paralytic. This is an exciting time! Embrace it! "I am so excited to finally be increasing my responsibilities and learning about the realities of being a team member! Whooeee!" There now, doesn't that feel better? Doesn't your brain like that better?

She's right. I've put down a LOT of NG tubes in unconscious people, and they sure as hell aren't giving me a cooperative swallow. NPO is NPO whether there's something already down there or not. She might not have had the patience to explain it to you as much as you might have desired, and I can't tell how hard you tried to give your rationale (more than once and I probably would have become a bit testy myself), but she was correct in stopping you from giving that patient water to drink. (PS: Swallowing water is not a guarantee of avoiding the trachea, either, even if sometimes helpful in some --not all-- patients.) Certainly true. As a matter of record, this is the definition of bullying from the experts, the Workplace Bullying Institute: [h=1]The WBI Definition of Workplace Bullying[/h] Workplace Bullying is repeated, health-harming mistreatment of one or more persons (the targets) by one or more perpetrators. It isabusive conduct that is : Threatening, humiliating, or intimidating, or Work interference — sabotage — which prevents work from getting done, or Verbal abuse Further, Dan Olweus, creator of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, defines bullying in his book,Bullying at School: What We Know and What We Can Do: "A person is bullied when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other persons, and he or she has difficulty defending himself or herself." This definition includes three important components: 1. Bullying is aggressive behavior that involves unwanted, negative actions. 2. Bullying involves a pattern of behavior repeated over time. 3. Bullying involves an imbalance of power or strength. I don't see threats, I don't see humiliation, I don't see physical violence or threats of it, and I don't see work sabotage. I see someone who is rude and I see you making a small attempt to stand up for yourself-- but did you think that one, "That's enough! Be nice! Be nice!"was going to fix this person, bippity-boppity-boo? That's not defending yourself, and it's not a functional response to someone who is being rude unless said with a big disarming smile. "Difficulty defending yourself" doesn't cover, "I didn't speak up like a grown-up." I do see a young nurse who thought she had a good rationale for doing something that was contraindicated and took offense when corrected. I see an older nurse who did, in fact, come to try the IV stick for you when you said you would be happy to try and stick a vein if she could find one, and you don't mention further "abuse" related to this anecdote. I see your account of your peers saying you're doing a good job of "fake it til you make it" regarding the thickening skin thing. All in all (and I know you're gonna hate this), I'd like you to consider this in the calm light of day in a week or so: Why is it that you think "you would do well to have thicker skin" is bad advice, and why do you think so many experienced people recommend it to a new grad?

Pediatric Emergency Care: January 2013 - Volume 29 - Issue 1 - p 63–66 doi: 10.1097/PEC.0b013e31827b5427 Original Articles Comparison of Rectal, Axillary, Tympanic, and Temporal Artery Thermometry in the Pediatric Emergency Room Batra, Prerna MD; Goyal, Sudhanshu MBBS Abstract Conclusions: "Temporal artery thermometry has the potential to replace rectal thermometry in a busy emergency room setting."