It's not all bad!
Written: Oct 29 '00
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: rewarding, making a difference in people's lives, flexible hours, many different career options
Cons: backbreaking, stressful, little respect
|
|
|
| LauraRN's Full Review: Nursing Profession |
Wow.. a chance to give my opinion on nursing.. here goes.. :)
When I was in college, I thought I wanted to be a math teacher. As I got higher in the math classes, I started to hate math and realized that it wasn't what I wanted to do. I had a student job in the hospital attached to our campus in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit's (NICU) follow up clinic. All my job involved was filing, computer work and bringing things to people all over the hospital, but it was a taste of what a hospital was like.
So of course, the idea of becoming a nurse began to appeal to me. Sometimes I would have to bring things into the NICU and I would look in the windows at the tiny babies and the nurses sitting at their bedsides. I started to realize that those babies were very dependent on their nurses and the nurses were the reason why they got better and went home. So after awhile I decided I wanted to be a nurse.
I remember when I told my parents. The first thing my father said was 'yeah, the first time a patient died, you'd loose it!' Well, he was wrong..
I was already a student at the University of Rochester, which is a four year school. The idea of an associates degree seemed stupid, so I went right into the BSN (bachelors of science in nursing) program. I don't think I even knew there were other options at the time.
I worked as a patient care technician during school which was an invaluable experience. I was comfortable with the way things were on a nursing unit and I got over the initial shock of taking care of a patient long before my classmates who didn't work did. I also think it made me a better nurse because I learned to respect the patient care technicians when I was a nurse because I knew what they do.
When I graduates, there as a glut of nurses and there were no nursing jobs for a long time. I ended up doing temp computer work for awhile and came very close giving up and never working as a nurse. But I was not about to give up what I had worked so hard for.
I finally got a job about six months after graduation on the unit that I had worked on as a patient care technician. This initially caused some role conflict problems because the techs I had worked with didn't like the fact that I was now a nurse and I had a hard time learning how to ask them to do stuff. But I got over it and so did they.
I really loved my job for awhile. It was a lot different than school and working as a PCT of course, and it was kind of overwhelming. But I liked the fact that I could work kind of independently and could make a difference in people's lives. I think I was very idealistic then.
This was a cardiothoracic (heart and lung) surgical step down unit and patients were quite sick who worked there. I caught onto the technical stuff pretty quickly but it took me a long time to learn how to talk to patients and their families.
On a unit such as the one I worked in, there are a lot of people around. There is the physical therapist who expects the nurse to help get the patient up, there is the speech therapist who expects the nurse to suction the patient while they check their swallowing, there is the resident who expects the nurse to read the chart for them because they don't feel like it, there is the pharmacist who expects the nurse to tell them why this order is illegible, there is the lab tech who calls and expects the nurse to tell the doctor about the positive culture results and obtain the order for antibiotics, there is the patient care technician who expects the nurse to help them turn the patient so they can bathe them, and then of course there is the patient who expects the nurse to answer their call light and bring their pain medication in 30 seconds. Needless to say the nurses get pulled into a lot of different directions and very little respect.
A lot of nurses talk about huge nurse patient ratios. Ours wasn't too bad, we only had 4 or 5 patients to take care of but they were very sick and often that was too many. The unit was understaffed (of course) and there were a lot of new graduate nurses hired. I was hired there as a new graduate and after nine months was acting as the charge nurse and orienting new staff. There were often days when I was the most senior nurse on. This was when I had about 1 year experience as a nurse.
I went home so many times upset because I just couldn't provide the care I wanted to. Sure, I wanted to make sure my patients got their pain medication every four hours on the dot and coughed every hour and walked three times a day and knew everything they needed to go home, but I just didn't have time. I knew I wasn't as good of a nurse as I wanted to be.
After about a year and a half, I decided to go back to school to become a nurse practitoner. I knew there was no way I wanted to work weekends and holidays and rotating shifts when I was 40 and it seemed like a good way out. I liked what nurse practitioners did and thought I would be good at it.
Knowing I didn't have to be a staff nurse for the rest of my life helped things, but I finally got to the point that I couldn't take it anymore. I had to leave. We were starting to get more and more sicker patients and having to take care of more and more of them at a time.
One of the great things about nursing is that nurses work in so many settings. If you get tired of one, you can always find another place to work and do something completely different.
I got a job in the NICU, the place that made me want to be a nurse in the first place. This was completely different. There are nurses who have worked there for 25 years. I wasn't expected to know everything. It was a BIG culture shock for me at first because I was so used to being the senior nurse who was expected to answer other people's questions. I didn't like not knowing anything about babies. But I learned quickly.
In the NICU we take care of 1-3 babies. It is an intensive care unit, but there are plenty of babies who are not that sick and are just too small to go home. We take care of some babies for months and watch them start out really small then get better and go home.
Babies are very resilient. I have seen some REALLY sick babies get better and go home. I have seen babies survive many things that adults would never survive. Parents are so appreciative because they know it is the nurses who get them and their baby through their NICU experience. They remember us for the rest of their lives. We get cards from 18 year old NICU graduates who thank us for what we did for them.
I graduate from my nurse practitioner program in May. I am looking forward to a new chapter in my nursing career.
So many nurses are so burned out and deal with so many horrible injustices. But it's not all bad. There are positive things to being a nurse. If someone asked me if they should be a nurse, I wouldn't wholeheartedly say 'YES!' But I would tell them what they were in for and how nice it is to make a difference in someone's life.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
LauraRN
|
|
Location: Rochester, NY
Reviews written: 64
Trusted by: 22 members
About Me:
Nurse practitioner seeking employment.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.