Q:
What inspired you to become a nurse?
A:
I’m a second career nurse. I used to work in fairly entry level corporate jobs, HR assistant, receptionist, things like that. I was fairly unstable, and I was let go a lot. One day, right before a meeting where I was going to be let go, I went to the dentist. Looking at the dental assistant who was cleaning my teeth, I suddenly had this idea—I wish I had her job. How did she get that? How did she get into medicine? Because she is taking care of people and that’s what I want to be doing.
Q:
What do you love most about being a nurse?
A:
I love that every day is different. I love that I’m meeting new people, but I’m not just meeting them, I’m taking care of them and helping them get better and go home to be with their families and live the rest of their lives.
Q:
What do you do as a nurse?
A:
I work as a med-surg telemetry nurse in critical care.
Regarding medication titration, seeing patients, assessing patients, we have a lot of responsibility in the ICU since we are caring for much, much sicker patients. We need to use our nursing judgment and a much closer eye for assessment to see subtle changes in patient condition. So, you can get out ahead of when your patient is starting to decline in respiratory function or cardiac function and have them treated appropriately. The sooner, the better.
Q:
What’s a typical day like for you as a nurse?
A:
A typical day in the ICU is busy, but I like to call it organized chaos. Anything can happen. Your patients may be relatively stable, or you may have a code blue or an admission that comes in that needs a lot of rapid treatments.
Usually, we start with two patients, sometimes three. We get our report from the outgoing nurse and then I go right in to see my patients. A full assessment of the patient, the history of the vital signs, the medications. You’re looking at your patient and seeing what they may need now, but you’re also anticipating what they need throughout the day, and in the future. You’re even looking towards a discharge plan.
In terms of making a difference, we see our patients and then we work through our day, half on the small scale with regard to medication to medication, vital sign to vital sign, meal to meal. But then we look at the big picture of our patient’s diagnosis—How are we going to get this patient better so that they can leave the ICU and go to med, surg, telemetry? And then, leave and go home.
Q:
What’s your advice for someone just starting out as a nurse?
A:
It’s tough at first, you feel like there’s so much work and so much going on that you can’t possibly keep up. You may get behind in your documentation, you may feel stressed, feel frazzled. Stick it out, it is temporary. The longer you’re a nurse, the more practice you have, that time management just comes to you.
Q:
How do you balance work and life as a nurse?
A:
It’s a very different lifestyle from a 9 to 6, Monday to Friday job. And I love it.
I love to exercise. I love to do yoga to release the stress. I love restaurants and going out to eat, discovering new foods. I love to go to museums and being a nurse lets me do a lot of that.
