I heard an interesting summary of universal precautions the other day: “If it’s wet and it’s not yours, DON’T TOUCH IT.”

Simple, huh? Some of the best advice is!

Cheery subject for a post, huh? But nurses deal with death, often daily. Even if you’re, let’s say, the nurse at the first aid station at a petting zoo (doesn’t sound like a bad job really) and don’t tend to deal with death within the clinical scope of your work, my experience is that nurses get asked about death.

Family members, co-workers, friends will ask you questions about health and life and therefore, death. Nurses consistently are rated the most trusted of all professionals, so folks will trust what we say.

There are a lot of good web resources out there to learn more about death and dying and the psychosocial needs of a patient facing death and their family members.  One of my favorite is the Friends in Deed blog.

If you saw the play/movie Rent you are familar with the group they called “Life Support.” It was modelled after a real life social service agency called Friends in Deed, located in New York City. Friends In Deed provides emotional support for anyone with a diagnosis of HIV/AIDS, cancer or other life-threatening physical illnesses, their family, friends, and caregivers… and anyone dealing with grief and bereavement. At Friends in Deed, it’s okay to talk about death. I think that’s a good start. Check out their blog to read some of the conversations.

I saw an article in the UK-based Nursing Times about nurses and empathy which basically said: a recent study revealed that nurses who empathize too much with their patients end up sharing their trauma in a way that is probably not healthy. The researcher, Jenny Watts, said that nurses may develop “flashbacks, sleeping difficulties, emotional detachment and other symptoms associated with distress and trauma.”

The study will be presented at an upcoming conference, and I’ll be watching to see what nurses have to say about it. This deals with some really basic questions that nursing students have to deal with. How much caring is too much? How do you care for yourself while caring for others? It seems like building something into nursing school curriculum that deals with self-care and getting support for difficult situations who be a no-brainer, but lots of schools don’t offer any kind of support for this. I think talking through difficult or traumatic situations is key: some trauma experts hypothesize that verbalizing trauma (and vicarious trauma is included) keeps it from getting stuck in the subconscious and causing PTSD symptoms.

I just found this new site, which while not advanced enough for our nursing school purposes, might be a good resource for patient education.

The I Heart Guts site is selling stuff too (like plush organs, and buttons and tee shirts and such although don’t order the uterus because they are recalling it) but it also contains awesome summaries of what each organ does.
For example,

“The pancreas is a cute little organ nestled between the bottom of the stomach and the top of the small intestine. This little guy produces digestive enzymes, but he is best known for producing the hormone insulin.”

Check it out.

In response to this incredibly messed up economic situation in the US as well as elsewhere, I’m starting a “Scholarship Saturday” where I will post about either a scholarship or a grant or another tip that might help nursing students in the financial arena.

Today’s scholarship opportunity is GBT Heart at lgbtheart.org. The scholarship is open to all “out” lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender graduate students studying nursing, medical, dental, pharmacy, podiatric, public health, or rehabilitation. The deadline is June 30, so go quick to the site! It doesn’t look like a ton of paperwork, just a pdf file to fill out and a few supporting documents.

My sister, who just finished her second semester in nursing school and is taking pharm over the summer, facebook messaged me the following. I think it’s an excellent example of use of humor in the nursing process. How do you use humor to get through the day?

Some nursing humor from my latest pharm assignment — I included both the question and my answer….I couldn’t resist… it’s just so deadly boring sometimes…

*****
Q: Explain why a patient receiving an MAO inhibitor antidepressant must follow dietary restrictions.  List at least 3 foods that a patient who is on an MAO inhibitor should not eat.
A: MAO inhibitors block the deactivation of tyramine in the GI tract, so tyramine is then absorbed systemically, which in turn creates a sudden release of a large amount of norepinephrine and can cause severe hypertension. Patients taking MAOIs, therefore, should avoid tyramine-rich foods, including:
•       Chocolate (oh no!)
•       Liver (OK, not such a tragedy)
•       Bologna and other fermented sausage (I’m from Wisconsin, where that WOULD be a tragedy)
•       Beer (also a tragedy in WI)
•       Sauerkraut (OK, perhaps this is not a drug to prescribe in Wisconsin…)
——————–

I would definitely say ambivalent would be the word to describe the nursing world’s reaction to Nurse Jackie, the original Showtime series that premiered this week.

You can watch the pilot online, but the basic premise is that Nurse Jackie is a hard-working, tough nurse in a (fictional) New York City hospital. She’s got some good qualities but she also has some proverbial skeletons in the closet. And (this isn’t a spoiler since you know in the first three minutes of the pilot) she has a prescription drug addiction.

I’m excited that there is a positive, nurse focused medical drama on TV that shows nurses doing the real bulk of hospital work. Am I thrilled that Nurse Jackie has a prescription drug problem? No. On the other hand, I don’t have the strong reaction of some other nurse bloggers who are calling this a travesty. 

I think it’s interesting that the same bloggers that are complaining about the inaccuracy of showing a nurse who abuses prescription drugs ( because we know those nurses do exist) aren’t saying anything about Nurse Jackie wearing a cap in the first few minutes of the show. This says more about the fear of talking about addiction than it does about the show itself.

A recent post in a student nurse livejournal community got me to thinking about my summers doing camp nursing. I started as an assistant to the camp nurse at Camp Echoing Hills, a special needs camp in Ohio. I did that three summers. It was exhausting, difficult work and totally worth it! Even though it would be totally depressing to have divided the number of hours I worked by my salary those summers, it was still worth every minute I spent there. Here are some of the advantages of taking a camp nursing job while you’re in school:
-I met a lot of interesting people from around the world (there are lots of programs that do exchanges with the US, especially in the UK, so most camps have a lot of international counselors)
-I got a lot of fresh air and participated in fun activities that I wouldn’t have if I had been home
-I didn’t spend any money, since we never really left the camp and room and board was completely paid for.
-I got a ton of experience that no one else in my school had. Since it was a special needs camp, under the supervision of the head nurse I got to to do things like J tube feeds, cathing, breathing treatments, emergency care etc. I also got accustomed to passing meds quickly. I believe this was all permitted, legally, because I was qualified as a medical assistant. I wasn’t using my SN credentials for this, I believe that would have gotten me in troube since I wasn’t acting as a student nurse.

You can learn more about camp nursing at the American Association of Camp Nurses website and even look for jobs.

Those camp summers were exhausting but really really fun and such a good learning experience. I also really felt like I got to make a difference in young lives too.

Okay I don’t usually get excited about tv programs, mostly because I don’t even own a tv which means anything I can’t see entirely online I totally miss. However, the nursing boards are abuzz about this new show on the TNT network calledHawthoRNe (get it? with an RN in the middle. Yeah.)

It’s a tv show apparently based on a character who is a chief nursing officer at a fictional urban hospital. And the character, get this, actually seems to be doing CNO stuff. Not like in most medical series where often the docs are shown in the midst of procedures and responsibilities that nurses would normally do, and nurses are shown mostly, well, being sexy and cleaning things up. ER is the worst for this. Would a trained ER nurses EVER have to be told to take a blood pressure on someone who is bleeding? Uh no. Yet, that’s what even medical students yell at the RNs on that show. It is fully ridiculous.

HawthoRNe doesn’t premiere until June 16, so of course the jury is still out. You can check out TNT’s site for more info but in the meantime I am looking forward to at least giving it a chance.

Oh and also as a bonus on their site, you can “recognize your favorite nurse hero” and read what others have wrote about their nurse/hero. I know there must be a clinical instructor or two out there who deserve a nomination for sure!

That’s a really big topic, isn’t it? And I had the idea of doing some super eloquent essay, full of statistics about the important work nurses do and poignant anecdotes about how patients’ lives are made better.

But it’s simpler than that. I became a nurse because I wanted to use my hands, and my heart and my brain and my whole self to make the world a better place. And having spent my twenties working in various non-profit agencies, being consistently underpaid and overworked, I realized that was not a sustainable life for me. I didn’t want to be always broke or worrying if I had such a specific skill set that it couldn’t transfer to another job.

Nursing really was the answer, and I always always always say (not just in National Nurses’ Week) that going to nursing school was the best present I ever gave myself.