Archive for the “Nursing/EMS/Medical” Category

Kim at Emergiblog feels the way I used to feel about nursing. She loves taking care of patients and can’t picture doing anything else.

The difference between her and I is that I lost that feeling LONG AGO and discovered I was trapped in a profession that was a dead end.

Kim talks about the fact that nurses are leaving the profession. There’s a supposed nursing shortage (which I suspect is really “a shortage of nurses willing to do jobs where they get too many patients to take care of and are paid crap”). Kim’s entry linked to an excellent article about why nurses quit. An article that I recommend to anyone who is an RN, thinking about becoming an RN, or knows an RN. (Also, Jo at Sinus Arrhythmia has an excellent post about this too.)

I’m still resentful that nursing was painted as such a promising profession, when it was 60% propaganda. No one tells you that you have to live in a big city to have any realistic chance at career advancement. No one tells you how badly you’re treated on a weekly basis. No one tells you a lot of things.

Why I quit nursing:

1) Number one reason: Verbal abuse/bad treatment from physicians and patient families (most of the time not from patients). I’m not thin-skinned enough to get yelled at by the family of the patient whose life I saved three days before, or by the physician whose ass I just saved the prior week.

Guess what physicians? This isn’t the 70s and women have more career choices now than nursing, teaching and social work. We don’t have to put up with your egomaniacal, abusive, condescending shit any more. We’re outta here! (Oh, and your physician colleagues who are respectful to nurses are mortified at your behavior too, but won’t confront you, yet they and their patients will suffer right along with you when we leave the profession because of you.)

In fact, I think that the only reason females stay in nursing is because they don’t have any other professional work experience to compare it to. They are ignorant of the fact that they would be treated so much better in a professional, corporate environment. If one of my managers now talked to me the way the physicians at my last hospital talked to the female RNs, that manager would be fired within a month.

2) Nowhere to go if/when you tire of direct patient care.

Some people get bored with what they do and want to move on in their careers. If you’re an RN and female, good luck with that! The chances are next to none. You can only hope to get as far as a charge nurse, after 15-20 years. Not really moving on from patient care, is it? Nope, you’re stuck with patient care forever, even if you want to move on to new challenges.

3) Seeing males with less education/experience/smarts/people skills get promoted to administrative positions in the hospital, time and time again, when I and my fellow female staff members could barely get interviews.

4) Seeing males make more than the females (when I applied for a cath lab job, I had my paramedic certification and experience, my RN with 4 years ER/ICU experience, and my BSN. I was offered a salary of $14/hour, when my male friend was making $16 an hour by the same boss in the same cath lab, with only one year experience as a paramedic and no other education)

5) Making 25 cents an hour more than a new grad pisses me off.

6) The lazy nurses who are dangerous to their patients and never get off their ass got the same pay I did, and never got in trouble for their horrible job performance. (Again, in corporate America those people would be fired in a month.)

7) Working more than half of the weekends of your life. Working almost every thanksgiving and Christmas (because if you’re an RN without children, you don’t deserve to have holidays off). Working nights (because your pay sucks and you need the shift differential) and losing friends because you can never do stuff with them. Sure, you can go work for an MD office (if a medical assistant hasn’t replaced all of the RN jobs), but $13/hour is only a realistic salary for married RNs who just work as a hobby while husbands bring down the main money.

Bottom line: The liability and responsibility didn’t compare to the salary. Doing it for the love of the job and desire to help people will carry you for a while, until you’re beat down by the bad treatment you get. Then it doesn’t, so you try to get another job within the hospital, but you’re not given the chance. You’re labeled as a “jell-o server” and not given any credit for any skills.

I recommend every RN I meet to start working on a non-medical degree (computers, business, MBA) immediately. By the time they finish, they’ll be glad they have a degree that will be respected. Unless you want to do direct patient care until you are 70, a BSN won’t cut it when trying to have upward mobility in a career. A GED gets more respect than a BSN. Wish someone had told me that back in 1992!

I fought for YEARS to escape bedside care. (When my 15 years experience in health care was getting me $17.50/hr as a trauma nurse, and my brother was making $25/hr working the line bottling beer, i knew I was barking up the wrong tree.) I couldn’t get interviews in even basic office or admin jobs until I went back to school to get my MBA. I only completed half of the MBA degree before I was snatched up by a business. They wouldn’t have even looked at me sideways if I came to them with only my BSN (keep in mind my work experience hadn’t changed a bit!)

I also think that the nursing shortage is being overly publicized because the fact is, there isn’t a nursing shortage for good jobs, only jobs that suck (floor nurse with 22 patients, nursing home nurse working in a horribly understaffed facility, etc.) Also, hospitals don’t care if patients get substandard care because most of the RN staff is going to be new-grads; they want new grads so they can quietly force the experienced nurses out with salary caps. Hospitals WANT the public to think there’s a nursing shortage so they can staff with mostly new grads and pay them nothing. They don’t care how many people die because of it.

And why isn’t anyone talking about the fact that a nurse can work 20 years for a hospital and when her back/knees start acting up after years dedicated to the hospital, will the hospital find an administrative position for her? Nope, it’s hit the highway sister! God forbid a nurse ever develops a health problem where they can’t lift people and stand 12 hours a day. You will find yourself suddenly not able to make a living.

Oh, and let’s not overlook the fact that the verbal abuse from the public (and possibly physical abuse) towards nurses is only going to escalate. The only press RNs get is that they’re stupid and incompetent… that hollywood star’s baby that was almost killed by a nurse giving too much heparin, all kinds of articles (last week on CNN.com in fact!) about how you have to be a “jerk” to the nurses in the hospital or they’ll kill you through their incompetence. Have you watched “House” closely? The nurses are portrayed horribly, and the audience cheers when the doctors tell them off as they bumble around and are no help whatsoever, on the rare occasion they’re seen at all.

It’s socially acceptable to be abusive to nurses. Talk to someone who doesn’t know you’re a nurse, ask about a time they had a loved one in the hospital - they’ll BRAG about yelling at the nurse.

It’s a hopeless situation that’s only going to get worse, and I thank God every day that I finally escaped nursing. It took going back to school, several years of applying for jobs, and relocation to a bigger city in another state, but I did it!

Oh, and if I sound a bit bitter, I am! I was a fantastic nurse. I was GOOD at it. I helped people every day. The doctors couldn’t have done their job without me. Even though doctors get the credit, the bottom line is that nurses save the lives right along with them. And all I got for it was disrespect, crappy money, and a dead end job. No one ever told me when I went to nursing school that it is a dead end job, but it is. It’s the most worthless bachelor’s degree on the planet, even though it’s one of the harder degrees to achieve.

So if you want to be a nurse, go for it! But I tell the nurse wannabes I talk to: Get your associate’s degree (pay is the same as a BSN). Then instead of going back for a BSN, go back and get a bachelor’s degree in something related to business, computers, whatever. Get a job on the side that has nothing to do with medicine, for business experience. In about five years you’ll be ready to ditch nursing and move on. Or even if you aren’t, you’ll have skills to advance in your career that basic nursing education doesn’t give you (OK it does, but it doesn’t translate on paper like a degree does). Also, if God forbid you’re ever hurt or sick, you’ll have a way to make a living after the hospital turns their back on you.

From my days working the Nurse Advice Line, I remember being so surprised at how many adults would call in because their poo was a strange color.

“I’ve been taking all of these new nutritional supplements from GNC. Now my poo is orange. Do you think it’s cancer?”

“I’ve been eating asparagus by the bushel. Now my poo is green. Do you think it’s cancer?”

“I drank a gallon of red Kool-Aid at one sitting. Now my poo is as beautiful as a rainbow! Do you think it’s cancer?”

“I just came in first in a beet-eating contest! Now my poo is red. Do you think I’m pregnant?”

Now, why poo changing color for one measly dump would send people rushing to their phones, I have no idea. Why not wait it out and see if it resolves itself? Of course the exception would be maroon, tarry, or black stools. That could indicate a GI bleed.

But lots of things besides old blood can cause black stools. When people would call in with black stools the first question I’d ask would be, “Did you happen to take Pepto Bismol in the last day or so?” and they’d invariably say, “How’d you know?”

I guess it’s still a secret that Pepto Bismol causes black stools.

Since people are so fascinated by their poo color, I think the Pepto Bismol could make a killing doing some advertising highlighting its little side effect.

I’m late for work and don’t have time to write, so here’s a scientific illustration that I did a few years ago, describing the life cycle of a sperm. I hope you find it helpful.

Drinkers of bottled water, don’t think you’re protected either.

Probably the very worst I ever put my foot in my mouth. Ever.

A few years back, I worked a free call-in medical advice line. People would call in with a medical problem or question and ask what they should do. Us nurses would give advice based on nationwide treatment guidelines and evidence-based medicine. Then the people calling in would ignore the advice, because they only called because they wanted a free miracle cure for their heart attack or head injury, and they wanted that cure to be administered instantly over the phone.

One day, I get this call from this guy (in his 30’s) who wanted to know how he could keep his girlfriend from getting pregnant without using birth control. So I spend like 20 minutes talking to him about natural family planning. I kept telling him it’s not a matter of math, and that you have to keep several months of calendars on the woman’s menstrual cycle, the woman has to take her basal body temperature every day for several months and chart it, and keep several months of charting of her cervical mucus (ewwwww!). I said that most women ovulate AROUND day 14 of their cycle, and explained to him that if she ovulated on day 14, then it wouldn’t be safe to sleep with her up to 7-8 days before, and 2 days after the day she ovulates. Of course the moron focuses on that, and thinks that if he knows the first day of her last period, he can practice natural family planning just by doing the math.

I must have told him five times he can’t do that; that women can ovulate even the day after their period stops. He was still trying to “shortcut” it and finally I got a bit exasperated. I said, “Listen, I’m telling you that if you are just going to do the math based on her last period without doing the rest of the stuff, then you WILL be a dad. That’s a fact. It’s not birth control that way. Even doing everything right the way I described it, and using early withdrawl on top of it, the method is only 80% effective.”

Naturally he ignores what I said and talks about how he’s already a dad, he’s been married before and he’s “Roman Catholic” (who says “Roman” any more?) and barrier forms of birth control are “not an option” because him and his GIRLFRIEND are both Catholic blah blah, and something clicked. Suddenly I recognized his name, and blurted out, “I know you!” Oops! He was a guy I dated a few times when I first moved here that I met off Match.com.

I had stopped seeing him about three years before, because he would tell grandiose stories about himself that I knew were lies, and eventually in the stories EVERY TIME he’d almost wind up fighting someone (I roll my eyes), so I knew I had a guy with honesty and anger issues. One night over the phone I heard him yell at his then 3-year old son and I realized I never wanted to see him again. I wouldn’t talk to my worst enemy that way, let alone a 3 year old. Parenting is none of my business, but being emotionally abusive to kids, well I just can’t stand it.

He remembered me right away and even remembered my last name (which is more than I could remember about him) and said that his now 6 year old son has behavior issues (SURPRISE!) blah blah.

I was like, “Well, congratulations on…. um…. needing natural family planning, I guess.”

I love the fact that he’s not Catholic enough to stay married, and not Catholic enough to abstain from premarital sex, but he is SUCH a good Catholic that he can’t use birth control. HA!

What were the odds that I would answer that call? Only me. I’m just lucky that way I guess.

That call was at least two years ago. So if I’m doing the math correctly, that guy and his girlfriend’s “natural family planning” aftermath is probably about a year and a half old now!