Topics About 'Nursing Stories'.

It reminds me of the query "what came first, the chicken or the egg." Do you become a good nurse because of your life experience, or does your life experience make you a good nurse? I just don't know. What follows is a bare rough draft of my feelings...

I'm not kidding. Now, I have been blessed with a good many talents, but the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time is not among them. My mother used to say I could trip over smoke. I'd walk over to a window to look outside and knock mysel...

School taught me everything I know. School taught me the delicate balance of life, how to be A FIXER. Fix problems and help patients achieve a better way of life. A patient, Lucy would teach me an entire new way of thinking...and fixing. I received L...

It was the end of Nurses' week 2007; I had just parked in the North garage and was heading toward the hospital. I walked down the short set of stairs leading to the cobblestone path in front of me. I looked towards the West, drawn by the unusual oran...

a great opportunity for an internship to become an OR nurse had been offered to me, but after this diagnosis, everything was put on hold. A disease that affects 1 in 8 with today's statistics, is a very scary thing. This article is to "lighten t...

The House Supervisor that night was a good friend to all of us. She was a wonderful, spirited nurse who went out of her way to be helpful to us all, and had a great sense of humor. Dr. "B", who is a diabetologist, decided to give me an order for...

1) "You're so smart, you should have gone to medical school." I AM smart---that's why I became a nurse instead of enduring 80-hour work weeks and giving up sleep for eight years. 2) "It must be great to be a nurse---you get to date all those sex...

.....I went and lost my heart to yet another hospice patient. Her name is Dottie, and she is 85 pounds of trouble dressed in a white satin nightgown and an ancient pair of fuzzy pink slippers. She came to our nursing home in early April for a five-da...

Each shift "Nancy Nurse", my character, was efficient, intelligent, quick thinking, compassionate, organized, quick witted and funny. She also had excellent assessment skills, and even better intuition. She always "knew" which patients required close...

In it also, are assorted pens. Pens that I have bought at Walmart, pens from pharmacy reps(my favorites), and pens that appear out of nowhere and find their way into my bag. I have some spare change and a few dollars to ward off the hunger pangs of n...

We had plans for children to visit the long-term care facility I worked at and we were going to hand out candy. I thought it might just liven things up a bit if I were to dress up. Plus, it isn't so uncommon to for nurses to dress up in nursing homes...

Every now and then, though, we get to care of someone who shows us exactly why we do what we do. Those cases, those patients, provide us with the inspiration we need to do our jobs despite how taxing they can be. I had the pleasure of taking care of ...

They were cramming for pharmacology and very anxiously awaiting the grades from a principles test. Some were crying even, and all of them were so stressed out it made me want to pull my hair out along with them. The girls were so pale and tired from ...

This man was usually compliant and oriented during the day but nighttime was a different story. But at least he was "pleasantly confused". As in, if he pulled out an IV or began yelling at the characters on TV, he would apologize when I asked him to ...

One of the guys was a very kind professional who wanted to become a nurse for all the right reasons. He really wanted to help people, not just make money. Unfortunately, he had never been in a hospital or convalescent home, had never worked as a nurs...

You don't get to be a nurse for almost 20 years and not learn a few tricks of the trade to survive. Gallows, irreverent humor runs rampant; despite all the teachings contrary, you often end up referring to a patient by bed number instead of a name; y...

During my time working in long term care, one of my lady patients who was very demanding and "by the rule" used to frustrate me to tears, until one day I noticed the pictures on the wall by her side of the room. In one of the photos, three beautiful ...

How much of life is occupied by the vain pursuit of excellence in areas of no value? Let's consider, for instance, pop culture. Few things are done with such fervor and finesse, but what is it really? Is it" dust in the wind", as a famous rock philos...

Our local pharmacy supplied all of our residents with their medication and the pharmacist was a grouchy man, who hated anything to do with our nursing home. The pharmacist had a bad habit of only labeling mediation with the resident's last name and f...

Opportunities to practice skills often came in waves with proclaimed "learning opportunity" attached to tasks that others didn't want to do. I was OK with this approach because I really wanted to learn and help out. So the days came where it was my t...

The night started out a bit rough. Of course, we were short-staffed, and my patients were high acuity. It seemed like every patient had a new med order that needed to be faxed to the pharmacy. I had one patient who weighed close to 500 pounds, and wh...

When I was in nursing school, I was doing my rotation in OB/L&D. I was still single with no children of my own, so to me, the Miracle of Birth was awe inspiring. My first patient was a 16 year old girl. Her boyfriend was 15 and looked 12. She was...

So, one day my manager gave me the choice... go home or go to the ER and help them out. She assured me that I would just stock shelves and help out the nurses and not actually take care of any patients since I had not taken care of an adult pt since ...

"What's wrong with death sir? What are we so mortally afraid of? Why can't we treat death with a certain amount of humanity and dignity, and decency, and God forbid, maybe even humor. Death is not the enemy gentlemen." (Patch Adams, 1998.) As we all ...

Unfortunately for me, David was my patient and I was the newest nurse on the unit. That meant I was usually assigned to him, and it didn't matter that I preferred not to be. I had to figure out some way to reach him. Thus far, I was failing miserably...