Stop being so miserable

Nurses Safety

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I have to vent a little on this issue guys.

I am in nursing school and during almost every clinical, its guaranteed that I will see a nurse that is miserable, that looks like this is the last place he/she wants to be. I am sorry, but no one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to be here.

Nobody likes being in a hospital, and it really brings you down. Seeing someone who is positive and overall happy helps the healing process IMHO. If a patient is sad and depressed, and then sees a nurse who is miserable and just not happy, it doesnt help the overall mood of the patient. I know this first hand because my mom was in the hospital for over 3 months and her biggest problem was negative nurses. She even yelled at a couple of them saying why are you miserable, your not the one in the hospital bed.

I know we are all human and nobody is perfect, but at least try to mask some of it or try not to let your emotions show. I get it, nurses are underpaid and overworked and underappreciated. Well, that can be said to almost every other profession out there. So please, for the sake of our patients, try to be a little positive and look at the big picture, it can always be worse!

Specializes in Acute Care Cardiac, Education, Prof Practice.

Veering away from the current thread direction a little: You know how when you buy a car and then suddenly you see all the other cars just like it out there on the road?

Sometimes that can happen with jobs as well. When we are so excited to be starting out in nursing, our fears (burn-out, stress, crazy patients etc) can gleam at the top of our consciousness. Therefore we tend to see the angry nurses, impatient nurses, crazy patients etc.

It seems to be a lot easier to pick out and hypothesize on the cranky ones, however the ones with the plastic smiles and caked on make-up are the ones I would be watching out for >.>

Just a thought,

Tait

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Specializes in pulm/cardiology pcu, surgical onc.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with anyone but I cannot believe how some people have got their panties in such a wad! Get over it, I'm sure ya'll participated in some sort of grandiose thinking too when you were nursing students!

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Specializes in Critical Care; Cardiac; Professional Development.

I have found a little bit of sincere appreciation, a hard work ethic, enthusiasm for what is being done, ability to be appropriate in timing of questions, an expressed desire to do all I can to make her day easier and a real hustle in my step has gone a long way toward softening up nurses whose days have been made more harried by my presence. I think how people act in our presence to some degree can be determined by how we act in theirs.

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Specializes in Peds/outpatient FP,derm,allergy/private duty.
QUOTE=mkhoaja;4516000]For the record, I am a male student nurse. :D

Having gotten that out of the way, I think I am going to end my post here. I have to say that it has been rather eye opening to say the least. I started a post thinking I was going to be enlightened and hopefully gain some insight. But all I have received are reasons for it being okay to be miserable.

OK buh bye but I want to emphasize again that the way you are coming across is strikingly different from the way you think you sound. The tone of your posts is accusatory bordering on cyber-smirk (I just made that up!). How is your thread that has a command for a title one that is looking for insight?

You've received many replies that contain more than "reasons it's OK to be miserable". If you truly were looking for enlightenment and insight, you wouldn't have made that declaration. You want to be right. That's fine, but it will cause you problems down the line. We get lots of second career nursing students here with backgrounds in "corporate and marketing" wanting to scold nurses about any number of deficiencies they want to share with us. Some have 15 200-word bullet points. Yours is one of the more restrained, actually :nurse: Good luck and I hope your mother is on the mend!

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Specializes in CVICU, Obs/Gyn, Derm, NICU.

[quote=mkhoaja;4515990

However, these are not the nurses/moments I am talking about. I am talking about the nurse who doesnt like his/her job and doesnt care. They give meds, do assessments, paperwork, etc all by 10:30, and then put it in cruise control till 6:30. They dont like having conversations with students,peers, patients, etc. even while they are browsing the internet for places to eat that night (sadly yes this has happend to me lol).

Wait a minute...

Doing meds, paperwork etc by 10.30 ? Doing everything early? .... That's a bad nurse

Not liking to talk to coworkers? ,,,, That's a rude nurse

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Being a new graduate, working for about 6 months now on the floor, I just got my first batch of students from the local comm. college.

Not only is it stressful being new to the profession just out of my orientaton, but now I have students to mentor...It's been a week, but I remember being in their shoes not at all long ago, so maybe that's why I am slightly more forgiving than my collegues sometimes are. However, even as a new grad nurse, I KNOW I am not the patient's servant, nor willl I be treated as such. I have a heart of gold, but a face of steel and can be brash when you're wasting my time. So my "miserable" look could just be that mrs. jones in exam rm 4 has rang 20 times in 2 hours for non-sense, mean-while, mr. Mcdonald in room 3 just coded, and her damn call light is still blinking while I'm in the middle of compressions, because "the people next door are being way too loud"...

I don't mean to come off as miserable, however I do not doubt that my face shows misery when this kind of stuff happens on a daily basis.

P.S. I do enjoy the students. Kind of! :)... but again, I'm probably naive!

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Specializes in Med-Surg Nursing.
Not only is it stressful being new to the profession just out of my orientaton, but now I have students to mentor...It's been a week, but I remember being in their shoes not at all long ago, so maybe that's why I am slightly more forgiving than my collegues sometimes are. However, even as a new grad nurse, I KNOW I am not the patient's servant, nor willl I be treated as such. I have a heart of gold, but a face of steel and can be brash when you're wasting my time. So my "miserable" look could just be that mrs. jones in exam rm 4 has rang 20 times in 2 hours for non-sense, mean-while, mr. Mcdonald in room 3 just coded, and her damn call light is still blinking while I'm in the middle of compressions, because "the people next door are being way too loud"...

I don't mean to come off as miserable, however I do not doubt that my face shows misery when this kind of stuff happens on a daily basis.

YAY! You GET IT!!! Welcome to the wonderful world of nursing!

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Specializes in Med-Surg Nursing.

The OP stated that we should all "STOP BEING SO MISERABLE". I countered him with reasons that his mother's nurse MIGHT be having a bad day. We are all human, we all have bad days from time to time. Unfortunately in this line of work, there are gonna be days where I'm all sunshine and rainbows and days where I'm a little more curt than I normally am. I've NEVER in my 14yrs of nursing had a patient say that I was mean to them or not nice enough. Nor have I ever had a nursing student accuse me of being mean. I experienced plenty of mean, rude and lazy nurses as a student. I just figured they were having a bad day and didn't let their attitude affect me or my decision to enter into this profession.

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Specializes in Peds/outpatient FP,derm,allergy/private duty.
Wait a minute...

Doing meds, paperwork etc by 10.30 ? Doing everything early? .... That's a bad nurse

Not liking to talk to coworkers? ,,,, That's a rude nurse

To the Tower with her!! (After her shoes arrive from zappos.com) :lol2:

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Specializes in Pediatric Critical Care, Cardiac, EMS.

Maybe we all need to step back, take a deep breath, recognize that other people are coming from different perspectives - and decide it isn't personal.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Just my $0.02.

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Specializes in Med-Surg Nursing.
Maybe we all need to step back, take a deep breath, recognize that other people are coming from different perspectives - and decide it isn't personal.

I am fully aware that people come from different perspectives but it DOES get old when not-yet nurses come here to complain about how mean, rude and miserable us "bitter old nurses" are. Same song, different day.

Let them take their complaints to the Student forum...you don't see me running over there complaining about how dumb the student nurses are ;)

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Specializes in school nurse.

Hold on, here's a new drinking game for the Holiday Weekend! Every time a non-nurse posts on a nursing forum, everyone chugs a beer. Double bonus (beer and a shot) for those posts by non-nurses coming across with an attitude while they're doing it. Guaranteed fun for all! (Trifecta/instant win is when the same post is written in a semi-literate, sixth grader prose....)

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