1. You remember working with nurses who wore caps.
2. You remember nurses (and doctors) sitting at the nurses station drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes while charting.
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 Alzheimer's, Geriatrics, Chem. Dep..
I remember when I was a kid and my mom was DON of a small rural hospital. We used to bake cookies for the nurses who had to work during christmas and wrote their name on them in icing. Doesn't seem the way things go now with management. It's wham bam thank you ma'am see you in the week, make sure you do all my work while I'm gone......
Specializes in FNP, Peds, Epilepsy, Mgt., Occ. Ed.
You may be an old(er) nurse if:
You remember when flow sheets started to replace narrative nurse's notes, and now you find it funny that a twelve-page flow sheet replaced a few paragraphs of narrative.
You notice that some of the housekeepers look more professional than some of the nurses do!
Specializes in Alzheimer's, Geriatrics, Chem. Dep..
You may be an old(er) nurse if:
You remember when flow sheets started to replace narrative nurse's notes, and now you find it funny that a twelve-page flow sheet replaced a few paragraphs of narrative.
I think we started with flowsheets, right? One page? Then the narrative, then the narrative plus flowsheet, and, as you say, the flowsheet increased to TWELVE PAGES! How awful!
Plus, we have to doc more and more in the NARRATIVE to cover our butts.
There ought to be more time studies done. They might find that we each have enough time to care for ONE patient because of all the ppwk!!! It's ridiculous! How accurate can our flowsheets/doc be?
Another thing that happened the last few years was that CNA's have more pages to fill out too - and the nurses are responsible for what is on them! Again, because the CNA's don't have time to care for all THEIR residents, their flowsheets get behind or inaccurate...
When you see the kids these days wearing their fashionable t-shirts that say "Hollister" and all you can think of is a colostomy appliance (or a condom catheter--even better).
I have only been in this profession for 15 yrs. Here are the things you all listed that we still do to this day.
-- Take B/P manually:chuckle
-- Lock up narcs in a cabinet in the med room:no:
-- Use glass thermometers
-- Chart everything long hand and in duplicate sometimes triplicate.( chart in the nurses notes, on the tx book, on the fsbs book, med book, etc)
-- Still hand cranking hob and fob up and down.
-- Give doses of Tylenol, Ibuprophen, MOM, mylanta, colace,etc out of same big bottle.
I know it's a new century but some one needs to let our cooperation know that.
Thought it would be fun to let everyone know some of the old ways are still practiced at our LTC facility. I just wish we could still smoke at the desk and chart.
Specializes in FNP, Peds, Epilepsy, Mgt., Occ. Ed.
When you see the kids these days wearing their fashionable t-shirts that say "Hollister" and all you can think of is a colostomy appliance (or a condom catheter--even better).
Um---What does the "Hollister" on the shirt mean, anyhow???
...You can honestly say "I've got a granddaughter older than you". And I have done that,but most of the nurses on my unit are older than my 29 yr old granddaughter. As they say,the work force is aging and who will be there to take care of us?
Liddle Noodnik
3,789 Posts
Sweet, and it IS the thought that counts...