MYSTICOOKIEBEAR

If you want to have the "College" experience while also achieving top marks and earning a degree in nursing, I highly recommend that you do the following: Step 1: Buy a planner Step 2: Use it! Budgeting your time and meticulous planning is the only r...

Actually, because we have advanced competencies and can take every other ICU patient from MICU, SICU, CCU, and NICU, that does make us a specialized unit not necessarily a "special snowflake unit". When the other units are full, and we have beds open...

The biggest indicators that a person is ready for The Units is A) They are hungry to learn more and want to continue to challenge themselves and grow B) They have shown they can very competently care for their floor/step-down patients C) Their experi...

When I graduated nursing school I thought I was a hot shot and that I wanted to go directly into The Units. The hospital I was applying to is a Top 10 AMC and they said that they DO NOT hire into the Units and said that I could start on the Cardiac/V...

I am happy and quite proud that my training and experience kicked in and held up in one of the most stressful situations that I have ever been in. I don't think I have EVER had to Critically think so hard in my professional life or in my life at all ...

I do not treat every employee in the hospital with respect, I treat them with professionalism. There are some MDs, NPs, RNs who are not very good, consistently make bad calls, or are just indifferent and because of that have not earned my respect. Th...

Tell them something along the lines of "You are being completely unprofessional and extremely rude. I am asking you to do your job so that I can safely deliver YOUR patient care in a timely fashion". That usually shuts them up and gets them into line...

You know your shift will be a hot mess when... You already have an ECMO patient and your attending is running down the hall in street clothes, and then have to help your attending insert another ECMO into a coding patient in the ED trauma bay. While ...

Unfortunately, only the Tincture of Time and experience will help abate this feeling. You and I are very similar in that we want to get everything done. But IMHO I think the best thing to do to help with time management is to make a list of things th...

Nursing preference or against hospital policy? Our post op cardiac surgery patients have a very tight insulin protocol devolped by our endocrine team in conjunction with our cardiac surgery team that requires us to administer insulin boluses to get b...

Being in The Units, at some point in time, you will experience and be part of a code. I actually just finished a video about nursing roles and positions during a code that might help you prepare. I've got some other videos that might help as well. Go...

I will admit, the first time that I had a patient that was close to me die while still new-ish to The Units, it hit me VERY hard. So much that I had an existential crisis and went on a $3000 shopping spree the next day because I was so upset and real...

Ask a lot of questions and don't be intimidated by the machine. Learn about it, figure out which dials do what, and definitely bring up what should be done in an emergent situation. You never TRULY learn ECMO until you take one. Good luck and let us ...

I started on a CVT Stepdown and wanted to quit every day for the first three months, got a hang of it, learned a lot in a short amount of time and felt like I learned everything that I could learn at about the year mark. It was at this time that I tr...

I work in a Top 10 hospital in the country and I started on our CVT Step Down worked there for a year and then transferred to tour Cardiac/Transplant ICU. I feel that the 2 years plus 1 year of experience will prepare you very well for a Cardiac Surg...

I would say listen to what the manager and nurses on the floor have to say. More likely that not, you will NOT be taking the LVADs unless you have had prior experience with them. If you do get the gig, ask if the nurses will show you how it works and...

CHG bed bath during night shift is the standard protocol in my Cardiac/Transplant ICU. Whether it is given before or after extubation is up to the patient's nurse.

The one thing that you already have going for yourself is that you want to learn more, you want to better yourself, and you want to grow. The best way to do that is to ask the MDs lots of questions as to why they did the things that they did and then...

I would recommend that you do 1 year in a CVT/Tele step down, then one year in a CTICU. It will give you a huge amount of experience in the moderately critical areas and then later on down the line in the VERY critical areas. This seems to be the nor...

I see patients come out of the OR with insulin in the VIP all of the time. I would, however, advise you to NOT run your insulin with your adrenergic agonists because if you have to give a bolus, you are "punching" the patient with a lot of pressors t...

Hear Hear!!!

In my Cardiac/Transplant ICU we call it "Dream Teaming" a patient (usually when they come straight from the OR). In any admission, and for the most part, you will have the same things that you will need to accomplish. So basically when we know that a...

Please correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that you are offended that the OP was sharing their concern and seem to be extremely defensive and very rude. You seem to have a chip on your shoulder and will berate and belittle anyone who doesn't have ...

First and foremost congratulations on getting a job on one of the Units fresh from school, that is no small feat! Secondly, I am very sorry to hear that your preceptor/s take offense to you not being able to learn as well from them. Nurses need to r...

It really just depends on what kind of pressors the patient is on, reasons for being on those specific pressors, the doses the patient is on, and the patient's overall clinical picture. If they are on 0.08 on vaso, 10 of levo, 5 of epi. I would say n...