You Know You're an Old(er) Nurse If . . .

Nurses General Nursing

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You know you're an older nurse if:

1. You remember working with nurses who wore caps. :nurse:

2. You remember nurses (and doctors) sitting at the nurses station drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes while charting. :smokin:

3. You remember when charting was done (handwritten) in 3 different colors (black or blue for day shift, green for evening shifts, red for night shift).

4. You remember when IV fluids came only in glass bottles.

5. You remember when breast milk wasn't a biohazard. :redlight:

6. You remember when chest tube setups consisted of glass bottles, rubber stoppers, and tubing.

7. You remember when white polyester uniforms were the standard for nurses.

8. You remember when you'd have given your eye teeth for a comfortable pair of nursing shoes (we haven't always been able to wear athletic shoes).

9. You remember when the hospital's top nurse was the director of nursing and not the chief nursing officer.

10. You remember giving lots of IM shots for pre-ops and pain meds.

What else?

HollyVK (with patient care experience going back to 1972) :gandalf:

Specializes in TRAUMA,TRANSPLANT,CARDIOTHORACIC.

the beers....years ago the our med fridge didn;t lock...talking 20 plus years ago..and part of the narc count was the 2 buds...at the time there was far more men in medical school than women,(I think just the opposite today),anyway,the good ole boys were always eyeing those 2 beers...the more they talked of football at their old alma mater,the more we watched them..it was our butt(the nurses,of course)if they were missing...and the few times they were we always caught the culprits...it was then their jog to go out and get them replaced,more than once some guys wife or girlfriend would come walking sheepishly into the ICU and and hand over 2 beers to the charge nurse. the bile thing does sound wicked gross,and yes they drank it,and they were MADE to drink it,something you couldn't get away with now...my A and P is getting away from me more and more as the years go on,but I do remember these patients on Gomco suction,and they were losing tons of bile a day...a problem at the time...today we'd slow down or stop the suction...there may have been an ileus,the need to as little abd distention as possible...now I'd love to know why...I had an uncle that was on IWO JIMA as a Navy corpsman....to keep the numerous wounded from going into shock they would give them cold cofee enemas..called MURHY'S DRIP...I guess it worked really well....he later workded at MASS. GENERAL in Boston,after the war and saw it used there as well,like a lot of trauma medicine a carry over from the war...my first den mother from cub scouts was one of the first to use silvadene for burn patients,she took care of people from the COCONUT GROVE fire in Boston during WWII....My uncle would also talk about how they would try and capture tape worms by making you swallow a string with some "bait" on it..then slowly pull the string out and the worm....

Specializes in cardiac med-surg.

your mental work up to go to work begins a full 12 hours prior to your shift

Specializes in OB, M/S, HH, Medical Imaging RN.

Hey adrienurse I too had the same experience. I woke up with a 103 temp, sore throat, HA from hell and yeah that was a long miserable weekend. I had to take the kleenex out of the box and they searched to make sure there were no cheat sheets in the box or on the kleenex, I had a box of Sucrets and 2 Tylenol tablets. No bottled water in 1976 only a water fountain to which I was walked and guarded. Gee's if we wanted to cheat we could never have written enough on or in a box of Kleenex to correctly answer 750 questions that we didn't even know what they would be asking. I also passed. Found out 6 weeks later by mail. I'm glad "those" kind of old days are over.

Specializes in OB, M/S, HH, Medical Imaging RN.
working on peds 4-12 with not one parent around! i don't work peds anymore , but i hear the parents stay 24/7, which i believe is good for the child.

parents were not allowed to stay past dinner, no matter how young the child. my brother was in the hospital in 1960, i was only 5 y/o, we walked in the room in the morning just in time to see the nurse spanking my little brother for spilling his breakfast in bed. my mom was mad but didn't dare say a word to the nurse and if you think that was bad, read this.....!

lysol ad from march 1948

in an earlier era, officially, only married people were supposed to practice sex, and thus be concerned with the effects of genital odor, except for menstrual odor, which was everybody's concern. squirting lysol up the lady parts made it a bacteria-poor container, all set to let the stronger, surviving organisms multiply and cause problems worse than odor, and eliminating the bacteria which are an inhabitant of the healthy lady parts. and, of course, the odor in the first place may have indicated serious problems, problems for the doctor, not lysol.

women also used lysol as a birth-control device, douching with it to kill sperm. andrea tone, in devices & desires (2001, hill & wang), writes of the lady partss that the liquid burned, as does the book facts and frauds in woman's hygiene, from 1936. see another lysol douche liquid ad, from 1928. but see a letter from an 89-year-old canadian woman who started douching with lysol at 17, in the february 2005 mum news.

lovequiz.jpg

lysol douche ad

lysol, which today scours toilets and bathroom floors, scoured lady partss (and helped kill sperm) in an earlier era, when, i guess, women were hardier. (andrea tone, in devices & desires [2001, hill & wang], reports on the lady partsl scalding lysol caused, and read a 1936 critique of lysol and zonite douching). note the powerful, horrible word "disinfectant." this is a black-and-white ad from mccall's magazine, july 1928, the same month that future life magazine photographer lee miller unwittingly appeared in the first menstrual hygiene ad to feature a real person, a kotex ad. she was just as surprised, and disappointed, as the rest of the country.

read 1930s criticism of zonite and lysol.

visit the odor page.

lysol28.jpg

lysol douche ad, 1948, at the museum of menstruation and women's health

I use to autoclave glass syringes and needles, as well as other non disposable equipment for a Doc. as an after school job while in high school. He actually carried a doctor bag and made regular house calls after office hours. I started nursing a few years after that. CVP's were measured from a graduated cylinder taped to an IV pole at the bedside. Glass CT bottles and IV bottles were standard equipment. Hand cranks to elevate the head of the bed, unless you were using an old bed, then you propped pt's up using pillows. Trendelenburg was acheived placing bricks under the the bed legs at the foot of the bed. We used an osciliscope for monitoring heart rythms, little round screen with the boxes etched in the glass.

Specializes in Emergency.

Last summer I went to this big museum exhibition about the history of nursing. For each decade back to the 1800s (maybe earlier too) they had medical equipment used by nurses during that time, and information about nursing practice, and nursing uniforms during that period. It was pretty interesting overall.

However, what I found most interesting was the group of women behind me all chatting about how they could not believe what they were seeing. The 4 or 5 of them were all nurses, and each of them was commenting on how they not only remembered using some of the equipment shown from MANY MANY decades ago, but they were using this equipment or these techniques until recently! Stuff the museum thought was of "historical value" was still actually pretty recent!

Specializes in Alzheimer's, Geriatrics, Chem. Dep..
I never quite understood the bile thing...it had just stopped when I got into nursing,I've had older patients tell me about from time to time...ahhhhh..the keys..they always had backups....and as wrong as it was to throw the damn things in the woods..I was younger then and doing back to back 12's with a one hour trip each way...so exhausted at the end of a shift,I just couldn;t go back...I did drive back a few times to deliver the keys...that's when i found out they had "sets' of new ones all set to go...told this by one of the veteran nurses...in honesty(no pun)probably the only dishonest thing I did in nursing,went to an excellant Catholic nursing school, and to this day those Nuns are still sitting on my shoulder...the hospital soon went to a numbered lock system after 2 men in stolen lab coats picked the med room ock in borad daylight and cleaned the whole thing out...

I always thought the bile thing was about returning what was needed to continue digesting food or give them something to throw up (ha ha ha!) or whatever ...

As to the keys, you had a numbered lock system? I don't recall that, I do remember a two lock system - Half the time the nurses would leave the medroom door hanging OPEN never mind unlocked! EEP!

Yes, the nun on my shoulder... (hmm, makes me think of an old song but I can't think what it is ... will let you know if I think of it...)

Specializes in Peds/adolescence; ortho; med-surg; LTC.

I am pretty "seasoned",but you must be as old as Methusala! LOL

Specializes in Alzheimer's, Geriatrics, Chem. Dep..
,more than once some guys wife or girlfriend would come walking sheepishly into the ICU and and hand over 2 beers to the charge nurse... I had an uncle that was on IWO JIMA as a Navy corpsman....to keep the numerous wounded from going into shock they would give them cold cofee enemas..called MURHY'S DRIP...My uncle would also talk about how they would try and capture tape worms by making you swallow a string with some "bait" on it..then slowly pull the string out and the worm....

re the beers - very strange - now if a resident came in smelling of alcohol (whether one or 20) they would get booted, would they not?

Murphy's drip - funny how we will give a name to something ordinary so people think it is something special - instead of COFFEE? Hey if you are going to give me COFFEE I want it at the OTHER end... (mmmm, dunkin donuts... drool... need a Homer Simpson "smiley"...)

Tape worms - now that's just WRONG!

Specializes in Peds/adolescence; ortho; med-surg; LTC.

WOW! I would love to visit this museum! Where is this hall of shame located?

Specializes in Alzheimer's, Geriatrics, Chem. Dep..
your mental work up to go to work begins a full 12 hours prior to your shift

Sigh, too true... :o

Specializes in Peds/adolescence; ortho; med-surg; LTC.

I never really think of all these memories. I do remember as a young nurse the "old-timers" would tell us stories of how it used to be. I guess I do not want to realize how old I really am! I mostly gasp, not laugh, when I am reading these posts. "We've come a long way, baby!":yelclap:

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