Full disclosure, I've never been pregnant... that being said everyone I've ever met has been. Once upon a time working with pregnant co-workers meant they couldn't go into radioactive rooms or take care of patients with chicken pox... at some point they may need more bathroom breaks, no sweat.
Now somehow I can't get through a shift without hearing about how pregnancy is making poor Susie suffer at 14 weeks gestation (give me shelter).
I'm sure it sounds ****** but if you can't do your job, get light duty orders from your doctor. We have full benefits.
We already have to work short staffed for 3 months while you are on maternity leave... don't half ass everything for 9 months before that and make us pick up the slack on top of it!
Today I tried to call report to the ICU while I was pulling my patient off the table in IR. The nurse told me she needed me to have a transporter meet her in IR to push the bed back to ICU for her because she is pregnant and can't push it herself.
We have self-propelled motorized beds, it's harder to push a shopping cart at the supermarket. I took the patient expecting to find a woman due any day now and was greeted by a young, healthy, girl who was barely showing.
I wish this was an isolated incident, but it's a growing trend and among hundreds of examples where women expect others to do their work for them because some of us take birth control and some of us don't.
There is no reason in the world a healthy pregnant woman cannot perform her work duties (baring obvious exposures). There is no reason in the world why an unhealthy pregnant woman should be at work in a damn hospital.
While it's not necessarily a disability, it certainly is a significant change in one's physical health that makes many women feel quite unwell even during the healthiest of pregnancies. Why would we expect someone to go through profound physical changes and not change a single thing about their behavior? This is in fact pretty much the only situation where some people expect such a thing. And the problem is women can not just quit their jobs because they are pregnant. It doesn't work that way. Believe me if they could, they would.
Since you've never been pregnant, you obviously wouldn't understand. But suddenly tasks that never were a problem before pregnancy are a problem. And trust me that is frustrating for the pregnant woman and the person she needs help from. Furthermore, trust that she probably feels bad/embarrassed at certain times. Imagine things that never made you gag before suddenly make you gag for your entire shift. Imagine that if you don't eat every 1-2 hours you start to feel shaky, sweaty, and weak on your feet. Imagine an actual weight on top of your bladder that makes it feel like you need to urinate urgently every hour. The list goes much deeper than that but these are completely normal occurrences in completely healthy pregnancies that genuinely make it difficult and exhausting to execute a 12 hour nursing shift.
Some women actually do stop working during pregnancy because they can't take it any longer. But the reality is you, just like any other woman, would push yourself to work as long as you could with whatever accommodations you could figure out. Quitting is a last resort. No different than when nurses come in when they are sick and push themselves until the very limit before they actually call off because of the limitations we have in taking time off.
When I was 7 months pregnant, years ago, I helped my husband move a huge refrigerator off the back of a pickup truck, in the rain, and into the house. Didn't think anything of it at the time! Now, of course, I realize how easily I could have been hurt.
In an ideal world pregnant nurses would get an adequate amount of paid time off before their due date but that is not the case. I don't mind helping pregnant coworkers with more physical tasks and have noticed they seem to really appreciate it and help with less physical tasks in return. We had one poor coworker keep refusing help and she ended up with premature contractions and bleeding, then was put on light duty (basically clerking and auditing). If I can prevent this from happening to others I feel good about doing that.
That's really the point here. (We got a bit derailed by personal attacks/how dare you stories but if you can't vent here then where are you going to do it at?)
If you can't steer a bed, you certainly can't turn a vented ICU patient Q2, pull someone up in bed, do chest compressions, lift heavy objects, or many of the other physical tasks required of an ICU nurse in a large metropolitan hospital. So you shouldn't be working at the bedside.
But the lions share of those cases have never been told they can't do these things. All these personal reports in this thread alone show just how many women work up to their due date performing their work duties. It feels like more and more I'm working with girls who announce they are 12 weeks pregnant and the next day are suddenly frail sacred vessels unable to lift a stapler.
You don't need PTO to be on desk duty, we have someone using short term disability because her doctor put her on bedrest right now. Her PTO is safe and sound and being banked for maternity leave.
As per the amount of PTO someone has, that is entirely up to them. We all accrue PTO and have the ability to save it or spend it. I work with people who have hundreds of hours in their bank and others that never have more than 10. If I got pregnant tomorrow I'd be screwed because I pretty much use my PTO as I get it and only leave enough for 2 weeks in my bank for emergencies. My unpaid maternity leave would not be because the hospital doesn't provide me with enough PTO. It would be because I went on too many vacations last year, and my mom got sick.
And where, in many places, their ability to access and pay for contraception is controlled by a bunch of white males with more power than them.
Not at all disagreeing here just thought I'd take a moment to plug some really great organizations making contraception (including emergency contraception) available and affordable to underserved populations through the internet.
There is a growing movement to provide affordable birth control to women through internet consultations to increase use and availability and decrease cost. Most of these sites will deliver monthly birth control for $20 or less without insurance.
Back to the topic at hand. Registered Nurses have insurance, resources, and access to care.
If they are that frail, they should not be at work.
Their weakness, if they are truly weak, should not require you to do their work. The boss needs to staff properly.
Speak up at work, don't just complain here, or nothing will change.
Wow, someone listened. Wasn't sure that would happen. Now we have come full circle to my point. You are getting paid (very well might I add) to do a job. You need to be able to do this job. Nursing is physical and mental. If you can't work, that means I end up working harder than I already am. I've already been doing this 12 years, I'll be doing it for another 33 before I retire. I don't like the idea of injuring myself because the person across the stretcher from me doesn't think she should be lifting.
The problem with bringing these things up myself if we aren't talking about women who work on my unit. I work in Interventional Radiology. ICU brings us their patients (or at least they are supposed to) so we work with a lot of ICU nurses. For me to report this behavior properly I would have to go through the chain of command between directors in two departments. If this was a coworker on my unit it would be much less complicated.
First off, why don't you mind your own business? Second, if you've never been pregnant you have no idea what it's like. Third, you've never met EVERY pregnant woman so you can't speak. Fourth, are you even really a nurse??? After you made that comment you have me very concerned.
Ok so you went there, I'm going there. Yes &$#@^ I'm a nurse. I've been an RN since I was 21 years old, I worked in ICU and step down for 11 years before I changed specialties a year ago to Neuro Interventional Radiology. My hospital has the largest stroke program in the region. Before that I worked as a traveler and had the opportunity to be a guest staff member in ICUs in some of the top Magnet children's hospitals in the country.
Exactly what nursing home do you work as an LVN at?
That tells me everything I need to know.
Really? Most of us have never been in our patients' positions either but we are all pretty quick to tell them when they should and shouldn't be able to work. Remember this next time you tell a man with an enlarged prostate how much pain medicine he can have.
You win. We can all go home.
Being pregnant is difficult. More difficult for some than others. Your efforts could be better spent supporting health care reform so that women can take time off for pregnancy symptoms that interfere with their work.
We call that short term disability, if they elect for this when they enrol for their benefits and their doctor takes them out of work they don't have to use PTO or FMLA.
If you can't steer a bed, you certainly can't turn a vented ICU patient Q2, pull someone up in bed, do chest compressions, lift heavy objects, or many of the other physical tasks required of an ICU nurse in a large metropolitan hospital. So you shouldn't be working at the bedside.
That is just not necessarily true. Something about pushing beds around corridors at my facility torqued my back. I was okay on a straight shot, but the turning around corners in order to get the patient to the elevator, off the elevator, and to the new unit stressed my back to the degree that it was difficult to function the next day. Once I had to take several weeks off because after a day of pushing beds around my facility multiple times, my back hurt so bad that I could hardly breathe. It felt like there was a knife sticking in my upper back. My spine doc just said "well, just quit pushing beds around." Other than that one particular task, I was perfectly capable of doing everything else required of the job (ICU).
You (and others who insist that if a pregnant woman cannot perform every single duty she was able to do before, she shouldn't be working), should be aware of the fact that pregnant women are legally protected, even as they do not qualify as disabled per the ADA.
An employer is required to provide accommodations to pregnant women. A pregnant woman may not need to be put on light duty, it just may be that she needs certain accommodations (for example, help with patient transport if that is something that is difficult for her). There is no reason for her to not work if she has difficulty doing chest compressions-she can record, give medications, or work the defibrillator. If a pregnant woman cannot fulfill the majority of her duties, that's a different kettle of fish, but if she can perform the majority of her duties and simply needs a few helpful accommodations, that is not too much for her to ask regardless of how we, the non-pregnant, feel about it.
Not every pregnant woman experiences the same difficulties, so saying that because some women can work with no accommodations until the very last day all pregnant women should do the same or be put on desk duty or sent home isn't fair or legal.
I feel as if I at one point had some "GaryRay" in my personality and my beliefs about how nursing care should be performed. But honestly the bigger picture overwhelmed that. As I said before, surely you can find some issues that are more purposeful or more neglectful or more insidious/clever to go up in flames about.
For example, GaryRay, does your employer do much of anything at all to make sure (via appropriate staffing and resources) that the lifting, pushing and pulling you do is in line with that advertised as a requirement of your role or the ICU nurse's role?
I didn't think so.
Just relax for a second (if I may kindly ask that) and think this through.
If a patient weighs even a modest 180 lbs, that's a bare minimum of 3 people who should be available to do a basic lift/transfer, etc. whether anyone is pregnant or not - - going solely by written job requirements. Obviously manpower needs go up from there if you want to be a little more realistic about the common weights we're dealing with. Now when is the last time you saw that? My experience has been that I would be completely expected to be a second (not 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th) person to help "boost" (drag) a patient up in bed even if they happen to weigh 3 times my weight.
If you don't want to hurt your back, then the very first thing you should do is refuse to operate in an unsafe manner.
I'm going to get just a little bit armchair psychologist on you here, and suggest that you secretly feel that you work pretty hard despite obstacles in your way. And that it's important to you to do so; it's part of your identity. I personally think that, in and of itself, is respectable and admirable. Be content with that. Really. Just be fine with knowing you're doing the best you can and that your best is pretty darn good on most days. Your back is only going to get hurt if you let it, and for the most part you're only going to be taken advantage of by coworkers if you allow it. And everything's okay with you. You're good. Just be happy about that. I'm totally serious about this, not one ounce of sarcasm intended.
Ok so you went there, I'm going there. Yes &$#@^ I'm a nurse. I've been an RN since I was 21 years old, I worked in ICU and step down for 11 years before I changed specialties a year ago to Neuro Interventional Radiology. My hospital has the largest stroke program in the region. Before that I worked as a traveler and had the opportunity to be a guest staff member in ICUs in some of the top Magnet children's hospitals in the country.
Exactly what nursing home do you work as an LVN at?
Well that was nasty of you. Why be like that? "She offended me first", so its okay?
Do you really think that list of "accomplishments" makes you better than another nurse?
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subee, MSN, CRNA
1 Article; 6,121 Posts
Just remember that those pregnant nurses are bringing forth the future taxpayers who will pay for your nursing home:)