Topics About 'Self Reflection'.

Need advise from fellow nurses. I recently was attacked verbally by a family member who yelled and screamed at me and then told my supervisor I was a horrible nurse and he was going to report me to state. I did nothing wrong but but it being LTC the ...

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...

........Some years ago when I was still working Med/Surg, I had a patient who could be described diplomatically only as "fluffy". In actuality, she was a diabetic who weighed more than 400 lbs. A pleasant sort, she struck up conversation with me as I...

When I started that day it seemed the paramount thing to me just to get rid of the dress bypassing my state board exams. My clinical rotations had become routine stuff after two years. My mentor hardly bothered to check on me anymore. I thought I was...

Imagine being seated on a comfortable sofa in a warm, well-appointed office designed to make you feel at home, fidgeting nervously and struggling to find a neutral position as the man across the table from you delivers his findings in a kind, but reg...

I could say I pursued nursing because I wanted to follow the footsteps of my mother who is RN, but that is the usual every other day story you normally hear. This was one of the reasons why I decided to become a nurse, however, one of my other reason...

Lets be honest here. Nurses love to whinge. And to be fair, we do have a lot to whinge about. Pay, for example. It took me four years of university to gain a nursing degree. In that same time I could have qualified in law, architecture or pharmacy, a...

His journey began two years prior. He received the diagnosis of colon cancer and began chemotherapy. All of the nurses at the treatment center would fight over who got to take care of him. I cannot think of a person who did not love this man or at th...

At work, I was participating in an accreditation survey. This is a nerve-wracking experience where a seasoned surgeon spends the day reviewing the program. My colleague received notification that the surgeon was coming from Puerto Rico, her reaction ...

Dear floor, ED and ICU nurses, Please forgive me. I know he's dying. I get it. I do. We were told five years. Five years on an outlier and he would be gone. We were told transplant was an option but with the dismal survival rates, we opted for rehab....

I used to work at a theme park, and the 2 weeks around spring break were unofficially known as "marathon" because we went from weekends only to daily operation. But since most of the high schoolers only have one week off, and a lot of summer people h...

I became a single parent in 1989 I finally left an abusive marriage, I was now going to move on with my life and follow my dreams. I always wanted to be a nurse as we often referred to ourselves in 1989, we were also called RGN's in the UK which mean...

When I was a young girl growing up in America's Mid West, my mother loved nursing and thought that her daughter should follow in her footsteps. It was her dream that helping people was a great profession and she wanted me to become a nurse when I gre...

Today I remembered a 4 yr old... lifeless, so pale, except for the bruises which covered his body. I remember so vividly the parent who angrily confessed that "the boy just refused to walk right"...so he beat him to death. I thought about the terror ...

Even cafeteria duty which used to be a punishment. Listening in on pre-pubescent conversations to get a hint of what the next generation is thinking. Standing in the corner looking bored so they don't know I'm taking it all in. I miss teaching. Seein...

They let me take the entrance exams in Universities with Nursing programs; setting aside my chance to study in the University of the Philippines where I passed for the course Sociology. So there I was, I took the entrance exams in two Universities wh...

You don't know how long you've hovered on the edge of consciousness, but as your eyes drift open, the dull ache in your head roars to life as a tympani thunders behind your eyes at the glare of surgical lights, making your cloudy vision pulse at the ...

Maybe it was because I practically grew up in a hospital. Maybe I just had a natural tendency to care for others. As a child, I declared that I would be a doctor since doctors had save my life with historical open-heart surgery. Whether it was the fa...

I was middle-aged when I decided to become Catholic. My mother was raised in a fundamentalist church -- one of those churches where Sunday services last all day and there's a lot of (literal) Bible thumping involved. (I'll never forget the Sunday my ...

Why did you become a nurse? This is a common question that is asked of nurses. Here is my story of why I became a nurse and how I discovered my dream job. In 1995, I attended an educational course sponsored by the Ophthalmic Nurses Society (ASORN). A...

Mother's Day in the ICU-working the night shift, my 3 younger children home asleep with their father watching over them. As I was getting report, I asked the day nurse 'what's going on in room 2?" She said, 'not your patient-be glad about that!" ...

I'm a mother/baby nurse and proud to be one. Compared to lots of units, we mother/baby folks might be considered lucky to have such 'cake' jobs, and some days I'd agree. Other days I leave work exhausted, with sore feet, sore back, dry mouth, empty s...

In the hustle and bustle of morning shift change on the busy GI/GU unit, I stuck close to my preceptor, watching it all with wonder and more than a little bit of fear. I took report as best I could, checked my sheet against the assignment board, and ...

Medicalese is a language that flows as easily as our mother tongue after a few years in the business, but as I was lying in bed last night, wide awake long after sending a resident in flash pulmonary edema to the hospital, I got to thinking about the...

Although I came into this profession relatively late in life, I have been around healthcare long enough now to yearn for the "good old days", when nursing homes looked like hospitals and hospitals (and other care facilities) had squeaky-clean, shiny ...