Busy Busy!

All throughout nursing school people told me that the first year of nursing was extremely difficult. I wasn't exactly sure what they meant until now. I have been incredibly busy the past month and have at least one mental breakdown to show for it. The past 9 weeks, I've been in a critical care internship. Having been hired to a critical care floor (as opposed to general surgical or medical), my hospital has a program for anyone who is new to progressive care. It's basically ICU level classes and information relating to what we might run into in patient care. This class almost killed me, but not necessarily because it was hard. The information was actually a more in depth review of stuff I already learned in nursing school. Only it was two 8 hour days per week. On top of that, I worked two 12 hour days on the unit. In result, I was always working, although not working enough on the unit to feel like I was getting a full work week's worth of information about the unit. So I made a medication error. I hung a bag of IV medication and never unclamped the tubing, so that the patient got an infusion of normal saline instead of the medication. I felt awful because I normally don't allow myself much grace on things that I actually know how to do. It was really just negligence on my part. Now the patient was OK, everything turned out fine, and all my peers and coworkers told me that this is something that we all do at one point. It's important to understand that healthcare is done completely by human beings, and we all make mistakes. After that, however, I started not being able to sleep. I've never had issues sleeping before, but for a few weeks I was getting around 4 hours of sleep a night. Somewhere in a run where I was working basically 10 days straight, I found that I was unable to turn my car on. I sent it to the shop only to find out three days later that nothing was wrong with it. Instead, I had completely lost most function including being able to turn on the manual car I've owned for the past two years. When I realized that nothing was actually wrong with the car, it was just something wrong with me; I had my meltdown. I was tired, and completely mentally exhausted. I had made errors and failed to live up expectations of my job. but more importantly, I felt that I was letting myself down. I felt like I had thought that I could take the stress of starting a job as an RN and do it with grace. Instead, I was secretly out of control and couldn't take care of myself enough to handle a very stressful job. I'm doing much better now, just so you know. I've been making a point to sleep more, and I've joined a gym and started working out again. I guess I just needed to let it all out and realize that this is going to be a hard year for me. But by expressing those frustrations and allowing myself to not always be perfect, I can take it in stride. My class is finally over, and things are getting back to normal. I can only hope that things go a little more smoothly. At least until I get off of orientation.

My Ethical Issues Regarding Medicine

I have recently been experiencing a feeling/thought process that I would like to share with you, because it's a reoccurring theme for my ethical issues with the whole process of medicine and patient care. First of all, as we all know, medicine has come a very long way even as recently as in the last 50 years. The leading cause of death in the early 1900s was pneumonia. The further we've gotten with medications, technology, and new discoveries like germs (amazing), we've whittled down the things that kill us to where it seems like we are fighting Death itself. We have acquired the medical ability to keep alive, what would have never lived in the past, and this is a good thing. Or sort of. What has become of this are several cultural phenomenons that I do not agree with. First of all, medical professionals acquire a God-complex in which we will FIX you, no matter what. Secondly, everyone else believes them and acquire a reckless, teenage boy outlook, in which everything can be fixed, and nothing bad will ever happen to them. This combined with human nature, which already tends to be gluttonous, greedy, and reckless, gives people the idea that treating their bodies and their life poorly is a right which they possess. And it is. What happens in result is that when something does inevitably go wrong with their health, they expect us (healthcare workers) to cure them. Oh, and on House, this is exactly how it happens. In real life, however, we can usually only "manage" the disease you helped yourself get with a pill, which seems so easy to take. I realize that I'm starting to rant. The point I'm trying to make, is that it's tragic to me that people can be so careless with themselves (myself included) and so selfish to expect that you can get away with it forever. What's even worse, is that usually you can get away with it for a very long time, and that brings me to my next major concern. I'm wondering if using all of our medications and technologies in order to put off the inevitable is even morally sound. People tend to think the American society is a "throw away" culture where we even dump our loved ones into "homes." But what is more wrong with that, I feel, is that before Grandma got to where she couldn't even function anymore and had to be put away, she had a disease process that would have killed her 10 years before that's been "managed" with her medications. I conjure up pictures of nursing home nurses spoon feeding crushed up blood pressure pills to patients who have no idea what's going on, and it makes me feel like somehow Medicine has become a torture device for the 20th century. Is it really so bad to let people go? Is Death really that bad? What I end up feeling, sometimes, is that I'm an enabler. I give people the means in which they can continue being bad to themselves, and then physically last long enough to see their life become only a fraction of what it once was. And this bothers me. I know this sounds incredibly pessimistic. There are plenty of people who are legitimately sick (healthcare people use the word "sick" as a blanket term meaning they are having very serious medical issues, that need acute help) and plenty of people who need all the medical advances we've made. But medicine is being exploited to become something it shouldn't, and everyone does it, and everyone knows it. I love working in an environment where these issues are one everyone's mind in someway, I find it really interesting and fulfilling. Everyonce in a while, however, I start feeling that instead of performing my duty to society (I'm of Kantian ideology), instead, I'm assisting in it's failures.

What being a nurse means to me

First of all, I guess I would like to explain why I am a nurse. There were a few life events in my adolescence in which I basically realized that I had a high tolerance to gross bodily functions and found all of it to be super cool, but I have also fine tuned my reasoning in my young adult life. A lot of people ask if I am a nurse because I want to "save lives" or "help people," which is a fair enough line of reasoning, but I always sarcastically swat this down. I don't want to intentionally sound pessimistic or jaded or whatever, but it really isn't about that to me. The fact of the matter is that in very few instances can you really say that you "saved" someone or even truly "helped" them. Most of the times, you simply get people through (or sometimes not) a time in someone's life when they are not well. Although this doesn't sounds as cool as saving someone, I actually believe that it's a pretty cool thing. I would describe myself as a humanist. I could go into Humanism and it's many different meanings according to different philosophers over the years, and perhaps I will on a different post, but for now I will stick with the two sentence Wikipedia definition. "Humanism is a worldview and a moral philosophy that considers humans to be of primary importance. It is a perspective common to a wide range of ethical stances that attaches importance to human dignity, concerns, and capabilities, particularly rationality." (and yes, I will probably quote wikipedia quite often). For me, it means that I find people to be infinitely entertaining and amazing; a being that never ceases to surprise. In a hospital, as a nurse, you are in direct contact with people in a way you would never be ordinarily. We, quite literally, strip you naked, put you in a one-size-fits-none sheet, and then ask you about your entire life story including your last bowel movement. I can honestly say, I know more about your grandmother than you do, or ever wanted to. But in all seriousness, I get to live very important life moments with people I hardly know, and it's amazing the things you see in humanity when you get to experience that. I've seen a father see his first baby girl being born. I've seen a son crying and telling of the great things his father has done after his father died. I've also seen abuse, manipulation, addiction, all sorts of mental illness, and one time, I saw a child die. I know that this kind of exposure to people isn't for everyone, but that's why I'm a nurse, and you're not. I enjoy finding out about people, trying to understand why someone does what they do, and always being blindsided at how different everyone really is when they are under a stressful situation. I know I should probably not wax poetic about this much longer, but one more point: through all of this observation of humanity, a nurse is required to take care of every patient, whether or not they like that person. That's what being a nurse is to me, why I am one, and why I love it.

What this blog is all about

Hello!
My name is Emily. I'm 24, I graduated with a Bachelors of Science in Nursing this past December, 2009, with a second major in Philosophy. I have recently started my very first nursing job, as an RN, and I'm very excited about what this new life will be for me. I have been tossing around the idea of starting a blog about my adventures of being a new nurse for quite a while and decided only today to actually do it. Because of my philosophy background, I am extremely interested in the ethics of healthcare that are omnipresent in hospitals. I realize that I have a different perspective of what that means being a healthcare worker and not a patient or the family of patients. I also see, firsthand, the effects of government and insurance companies on patient's care and the ability for healthcare workers to get what patient's need. The recent healthcare bill that passed in US late last night is really the reason why I'm going to start this blog. I will be a brand new nurse, experiencing the changes this bill will have on healthcare. The past year and a half I have not had health insurance because I have been in school and am "too old" to stay on my parent's insurance. I have been working in hospitals that entire time with school, and as a patient care tech. The healthcare bill will effect all of us, and it will effect me as well, as a citizen who has not had insurance. In this blog, I want to discuss my experiences as new nurse: the things I learn, the people I deal with (without revealing any patient information of course), the new changes that happen, and what it means to patients and healthcare workers. I wish to explore what it means being human while being healthy, and while being ill. I want to reveal the inner workings of hospitals so that everyone has a better understanding of what happens there. I also want to address (as best I can... I'm no politician) how the healthcare bill has effected my end as a healthcare worker, as well as an uninsured citizen. I love discussing what I do as a nurse, usually to the disgust of my friends and family who are not in healthcare, because I am really passionate about this topic. I hope this will be informative and interesting to everyone else as much as it is to me.

Thank you,
Emily

CNN Coverage of Health Care Bill

A little outdated, but funny, Onion coverage