What type of nurse are you?

I'm a cardiac step-down nurse. Or "progressive" care nurse if you want to be specific. I have my PCCN certification as well. Basically I take care of patients with AMI's that go to cath lab and get stents, pull arterial and venous sheaths, and manage certain cardiac drips...on my unit we are allowed to have every drip except epi, Levo, dopamine, & nipride. We see a lot of heart failure and lung issues as well, like copd exacerbation and pneumonia. Sometimes our patients are more multi system type patients and have in addition to cardiac issues, things like GI bleeds, illeus, renal failure, and the occasional stroke patient.

We also have a lot of arrhythmia pts....Afib, VT, heart block, etc, so these pts go for procedures such as ablations, pacemaker and defibrillator implants.

We assist with basic bedside procedures--cardioversion, TEE, chest tube insertion, thoracentesis, etc.

Then there's the post-op CABG and valve pts ( my least favorite)

Step-down is a very nice area of nursing in my opinion. It's usually a 4:1 ratio, which is very manageable. Unlike the floor/med-surge units where you get murdered with 6-10 patients. (I basically would never recommend that anyone work in med-surge aka "the floor", especially new nurses) They always have telemetry monitors on so you know immediately if someone is tanking. There's also lots of opportunity for learning and to perform many different skills. It's good a place for new nurses to start in order to get a good knowledge base before transitioning to ICU or ER if that's part of their ultimate goal.

It takes a while to find your niche sometimes. If you like patient care but not so much interaction with the patient and don't mind them being unstable--ICU or PACU might be a good option. No patient care and no patient interaction would be ideal for cath lab/interventional radiology or OR. Cath lab especially if you like a fast pace. ER is great if you're an adrenaline junkie and not a control freak/OCD about having a set routine. If you like a good balance between patient care and interacting with your patients, step-down and outpatient procedure centers may be good--you basically prep and educate the pt for the procedure, then recover them afterwards. Lots of skills, lots of interaction. I don't really have an opinion on peds, picu, nicu, or L&D...cause that is soooo not my thing.

Lots of nurses work in clinic settings or work for doctors in the hospital setting if being at the bedside is not what you want. Nursing is incredibly versatile.

Anyways...enough of my long winded nonsense. Good luck in finding your passion and hope you find nursing to be a fulfilling career!

If you look at the top of your screen at the yellow bar, and click on "specialties" and "critical" they will take you to all the forums of the different specialties of nursing - you can read all about the different areas of nursing there! :) There are so many different areas of nursing that it would be hard to summarize it in one thread.