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Trying to stay up to date in the nursing field while on medical leave

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Since I’m a nurse on extended medical leave I’ve been trying to keep up to date on health news, nursing techniques and so on so about a year ago I joined a few nursing groups and I get regular weekly or monthly newsletters.

The information I receive is usually quite helpful. It ranges from how to deal with grieving relatives and friends to new ways to treat chronic health problems like diabetes.

I came across one article today that talked about a new way to treat acne. It’s with acne pills. Now I knew that there were some prescription pills out there to treat acne, many in the form of antibiotics, but this is something different. They are antioxidant pills. It makes sense, but it was news to me.

Do you join internet based groups or sign up for newsletters related to your career so that you can stay up to date as well?

My Crohn’s is so bad that I don’t know if I’ll ever resume my nursing career, but just in case I do get healthy enough to go back to work I’d like to stay up to date as to what’s happening in my field.





More waste in health care

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I haven’t been to my workplace in ages. When I first got sick I used to drop in every now and then to see my friends from work. However I haven’t even had any appointments in the hospital at all lately so I haven’t been there for a long time. Maybe even a whole year.

About a year before I got sick they were putting all new counters, reception and office desks in the ER. The counters weren’t built all the well. There weren’t enough electrical outlets for all our equiptment and the ones that were there had a hard to move cover over them. So much for quickly plugging in a pulse oximeter or blood pressure monitor to recharge!

Well, now they are completely renovating the ER. Expanding it too. So I suppose all the work that was done two or three years ago was for nothing! What a waste of money.

I’ll have to make a point of dropping in for a visit again soon. I miss the job and my co-workers.

ER madness

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Speaking of my nursing career … I work in the Emergency department of a community hospital. I’m awfully lucky since the hospital is only three blocks from my home. I can actually walk to work! How great is that?

Now, I’ve been off work for a while due to my illness but I think about my job a lot and I still keep in touch with the nurses in my department. They tell me about some of the strange cases they’ve seen come in or how crazy it got in the department during the last full moon. (yes its true – there is a full moon effect, ask any emergency service worker!)

One of the saddest cases that I remember is someone who was brought in by the police. It was a girl who’d been dieting using Ephedra but she was over-dieting .. basically not eating. She was just skin and bones. On top of that she also liked to dabble in drugs … well the combination of starving herself, using diet stimulants and the drugs that she’d taken caused a severe reaction.

She was in bad shape! I was actually surprised that the police didn’t call the EMS to bring her in when they found her. Anyway, I spent most of that night taking care of her and worrying over her. She pulled through but it’s just mind boggling what people do to themselves.

I don’t have an end story for her. Unfortunately that’s the way it is in the ER. We do what we can to help people and often they are still very ill when they leave the department to go to surgery or to a floor for further care. Unless we specifically follow up on the person – and who has time in the ER, especially if the patient is no longer your patient, you just never know if they got better or what happened.

Anyone else an ER nurse?

I’ve been a nurse for 15 years?

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I was just thinking, it was around this time 15 years ago that I finally finished my nursing course. Wow, I’ve been a nurse for 15 years. It doesn’t seem that long!

I guess I should have happy memories of that time, but it was a little stressful. You see, just as I finished my course and began my new nursing career my husband went back to school. So here I was, a young nurse just building a career with student loans to pay off and I’d also become the breadwinner for the household since my husband went back to school.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure when I was going to school and my husband was the only one working it was hard on him too … but he wasn’t in a new career. At least he had that going for him.

When Chris finished his course I was still paying off my student loans. We then had to start paying off his too. His were higher than mine because he’d gone to a private school for an IT course. In fact I’d say his student loans were about 10 times mine! I’d had a couple of scholarships too so that helped keep mine reasonable, but still, our loans together were a heck of a lot of money.

We struggled through the payments. I never realized that we could have applied for a school loan consolidation. If we had we more than likely would have ended up reducing our total monthly payment and saving money because there’d be less interest on our total as we payed what we owed each month.

Well I guess you could say we learned our lesson the hard way. Now that I know you can consolidate student loans I”ll certainly be telling others that appear to be struggling to pay off their loans as they start out in their new careers.

Drug Rehab

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I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned in this blog that I’m a nurse. I’m actually an ER nurse. I probably don’t have to tell you that I see people at their worst. It just breaks my heart at times when I see someone that could possibly turn their life around come in time after time with drug overdoses. I wish we could get them all to go to rehab.

If you know someone that has a drug addiction try your best to get them to go into rehab. Better yet, if you can, you might want to read about the drug detox program at Stone Hawk and try to get the person in need of help into their drug rehab program. It sounds like they have come up with a well though out treatment plan.

It actually sounds like many of the people who currently work at Stone Hawk were once addicts themselves. Who better to understand what someone who’s addicted to drugs and who might be undergoing detox is going through than a former addict who’s been through all the stages themselves?

If you know someone in need of drug rehab take a moment to visit the site and get more information.

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