One of the biggest challenges in my life was nursing school. I swore that if I made it through, I would never do something so insanely difficult in my life again. LOL, what did I know? Being a nurse is an even bigger challenge than nursing school EVER could have been. I love the challenge of my job, I love interacting with people (most of the time,) and I love my kids. I spent five and a half years as an adult surgical nurse, short of cardiac surgery I worked on most any type of surgery floor you can imagine. I have now spent one year as a pedicatric nurse and I have never been happier, professionally speaking.
I work in what is know as a float pool, which means I am pretty much assigned to a different floor every night (yes, I work twelve hour night shifts.) I work on every floor except the Cardiac ICU, though I do work in the Cardiac Step-Down Unit. The Cardiac Step-Down Unit and the Neonatal ICU are my favorite floors to work on currently. Why? The reason is simple, I love the babies. In the NICU, I only care for babies. On the cardiac floor, a good majority of the kids I care for are babies as well. Not that there is anything wrong with the older kids, I have great fun with them as well. I am not so hip on the teenagers, but then teenagers are a species in and of themselves. I can, and do, care for them, but I don't think I understand them very well (and I am only 31, not like it has been TOO long since my teen years!)
Okay, as for being a nurse; I am a good nurse, no strike that, I am a DAMNED good nurse. I am a better pediatric nurse than I ever was an adult nurse, but I love my patient population much more, and that makes all the difference in the world. I may sound like I am bragging or that I am prideful, and maybe I am, but I would want a nurse like me caring for my kids should they be sick. I know what my strengths and weaknesses are, and I do have weaknesses, but I actively try to work on those, and I have even conquered some. That being said, I do still feel like I am a fabulous nurse and I know that EVERY child I care for is getting the best care he/she possibly could get.
There was a time, earlier in my career, where I would have encouraged people to run as fast as they could from this profession as it is thankless most of the time. I would encourage everybody who receives good nursing care to thank their nurse. We aren't there for the thank yous, but they sure do mean a lot, especially when given sincerely. Would I still encourage young people to avoid this profession, well, that is a mixed answer. I would encourage them to work as an aide or a tech and see what they are getting into. Nursing is a demanding profession and is not for everyone. However, anyone who truly wants to be a nurse would have my encouragement every step of the way.
Demanding, challenging, thankless? Yes, those all describe nursing. But the adjective that comes most readily to my mind is rewarding.
2 comments:
I am glad that you love your job and that you are good at it. I couln't agree more that good nurses are important. I will say that really good nurses are very hard to come by.
As someone who has spent a great deal of time in the hosptial over the last 20 years, I can tell you that there are many more poor nurses than there are good ones, and the great ones are few and far between. Nurses really do make the difference in a patient's care... the doctors just pop in and write orders.. the nurses do the real work.
I have a friend whose daughter will finish nursing school in December. We were talking not too long ago, and she said, "I have no desire to do any patient care." What kind of nurse doesn't want to take care of patients? I don't get that. But that attitude may explain the very poor care that some patients actually get.
I think the best nurses that I have ever dealt with were at Vanderbilt and at Barnes.
I can only imagine how hard nursing school was. But then again, so is anything worth having. I am glad that you get to work with kids too. You seem to be happy. That is great.
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In some, not all, nurses defense, I need to point out a fact about "poor" nursing care. I worked in one hospital that had a 56 bed unit and we NEVER had more than five nurses. We were generally staffed one nurse to 10-11 patients. Not only is this unsafe, it does not allow a nurse to provide even semi-adequate care.
I have worked with some terrible nurses, but I have also worked with nurses who go home and cry every day since they weren't able to provide the type of care they wanted to give. Even in hospitals that provide, or try to provide, adequate staffing, it is a challenge to give the quality of care that a nurse strives to give. With the litigous nature of our society, the amount of paperwork and charting a nurse must do takes three times as long as the care that you are charting about.
However, I have worked a some nurses who should not be nurses. Whether they are bad nurses to begin with or have burned out, they definitely give the rest of us a bad name and make it a challenge to care for the patients who have had to deal with these nurses.
As for your friends' daughter, unfortunately I see that attitude a lot. People who become nurses so they can become healthcare managers, however they are generally not very good managers. The best managers are the ones who were the best nurses, as they actually care.
Well, I should go and yell at the toddlers as they are out of bed. Take care.
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