Do Not Over-Share!

Bipolar disorder and other mental health issues are still stigmatized in healthcare settings, whether or not anyone wants to believe it. I am cognizant that many state boards of nursing require nurses to disclose certain mental illnesses. However, if management or the employee health department at your place of employment is not asking about your health conditions, I would not divulge to any of your coworkers that you have any type of mental illness, because it is unfortunate and inevitable that some of these people will label you as "nutty" or "unstable." Read More

Nursing Educators/ Faculty

Nurse educators meld clinical expertise with a passion for teaching to shape future generations of nurses and advance the profession of nursing. Nursing education is a rich and rewarding career choice. Nurse educators help aspiring nurses, novice nurses, and experienced nurses reach their career goals and fulfill their dreams. Read More

[Toon] According to Google, I'm suffering from...

Let's have some fun with this cartoon. Finish the following line...
According to Google, I'm suffering from... Read More

A Bathroom Reminiscence

We learn many things from our patients. No matter how brief the encounter may be, their lives touch us in many ways, sometimes in a very profound way. This is one such encounter where an elderly patient reduced me to a sobbing mess with his emotional story of his past during World War II. Read More

What do you tell parents when...

I've worked as a nursing assistant in the PICU for about 2 years, and hope to work there as an RN once I graduate...10 more months! Frequently, while nurses are getting a patient settled, I'm the one tending to the parents; getting their information, telling them the basics, answering any questions that I can, etc. Often, this is a period where parents are really distressed and emotional, which is absolutely understandable.

What do you say to parents at these times to be as comforting and calming as possible, while not instilling false hope? Read More

Compassion is a Commodity

After five days off, I drive to work singing. I'm a little off-key, but the windows are up, and my favorite songs are all queued up in preparation for the forty or so minutes my car will take to weave through 1740 traffic on my way to a place that I used to call my sanctuary. I grew up in hospitals, I used to tell anyone who asked why I would ever want to be in this profession. This is my natural habitat. But I digress..

The point is that I've been away for five days, and I was, for once, happy to be going to work. Or, more appropriately, I was very, very hopeful that I will not feel the oppressive depression that work has been inducing lately. Read More

Cops and Nurses

So a lot of the nurses I have spoken with believe they have a greater chance of being given a warning, instead of a ticket, for speeding if they have their RN badge visible when they are pulled over. Who here has been pulled over on their way to or from work and been given a pass? Who has bee ticketed? Is there any truth to it? Read More

A Mother Seeking Healthcare Career Advice for High School Junior

What other career options are available in the Healthcare field for her apart from Nursing, coming out of high school? What are some of the hidden gems that a lot of students are not aware of (Healthcare wise)? If you could do it over, would you pursue nursing as a career or something else within the health sector and what would that be? Thanks in advance for your thoughts/suggestion. Read More

High-Value and Low-Value Patients

A handful of readers might have had knee-jerk reactions after reading the title of this piece. Some of you were probably frowning as you muttered to yourselves, "High-value patients? Low-value patients? Who in the hell does the writer think she is?"

Let me get one thing straight. I"m not the one who assigned values to different clusters of patients. In fact, my personal belief is that all people have the same inherent worth and esteem, regardless of their current situation in life. To be more precise, the greater society in which we inhabit has ascribed different levels of importance to different groups. We sense this disparity when we see how well certain diseases are publicized while other afflictions are simply blown off. We know this gap exists by the types of responses people give when we inform them of our nursing specialties. Read More

Why do you get sick from the cold?

Isn't a "cold" from some type of pathogen? Ugh. Last night I went out without a coat in 20 degree weather and now I have a terrible cold starting. Read More

Tired Of Being The Bad Guy

The children's hospital where I work at has a standard practice of not doing painful or scary procedures in the kids room, and not having the child's nurse preform them. Instead the kids are taken to a procedure room, where an outside staff member is brought in to do the scary and painful procedures. That outside staff member is nearly ALWAYS me. I get a call from the nursing supervisor to please go to peds and start an IV, get and ABG, drop an NG, start a central or art line or some other procedure.

Last night, I worked transport. When some of the other transport nurses and I went down to the cafeteria to grab some dinner there were a bunch of kids from the pediatric floor getting ice-cream sundaes. As soon as I walked in the little kids just started crying at the sight of me.

Starts to get to you after a while. Read More

Nurse Practitioners

Nurse practitioners are experiencing a period of high growth in recent years. Many current RNs and prospective students are interested in more information on this area of nursing. This article is a basic description of this field.

Nurse practitioners are registered nurses with graduate level degrees and are considered advanced practice nurses. They are able to provide health care services to patients in a variety of different settings. Some responsibilities include: assessing, diagnosing, and managing acute and chronic conditions. They are also responsible for prescribing medications as needed as well as health promotion and disease management. Read More