RN

Nurses represent the largest percentage of the health care field. Within nursing there are about a zillion different jobs to choose from, so it's hard for me to tell you exactly what nurses do. But I can tell you what I do.

Right now I work on a floor or unit called the Surgical Multidisciplinary Specialty Center. That's basically a fancy way of saying that we get a huge, huge variety of patients. We mostly get kids that are in the hospital due to one surgery or another. This could be anywhere from brain surgery or a kidney transplant all the way to simply getting a set of tonsils out.

We have a section of our floor dedicated to rehabilitation patients. They are usually in the hospital for extended stays to receive very intensive therapies (ie occupational therapy, speech therapy, physical therapy as well as medical treatment). These kiddos usually wind up at Children's after some sort of traumatic accident that leads to brain injury. Sadly, we see quite a few cases of shaken baby syndrome that end up needed rehabilitation therapies.

Five of our 48 beds on the unit are dedicated to kids with seizures. Seizure technicians stick lots of wires all over these kids heads with the ultimate goal of localizing where within the brain these seizures are coming from. Localizing the point of seizure activity can lead to further treatment down the road more effective than medications. For four days these kids are constantly monitored by the seizure techs who watch screens that display brain waves. I have no idea how to read these monitors, but the techs do and are able to tell when a seizure is occurring (some seizures are very small and not readably noticeable unless we can actually see the brain waves). These kids usually do not require much nursing care unless a very large tonic-clonic seizure occurs--then it's all hands on deck to open the patient's airway and stop the seizure using emergency medications.

So, there is a brief look at the kinds of kids we see on my floor. Here is a bit of what my day looks like--

I report to work at the unhappy hour of 0630 with sleepy eyes and cup of tea in hand. Inside the door of our locker room is where us nurses find our assignments for the day. This usually consists of 3-4 patients depending on how busy our unit is. At 0650 report begins, I sit and listen while the off-going nurse tells me all about what is going on with the patients she had over night and now I will have during the day.

0730 hits and I head into my patients rooms to introduce myself and perform an assessment, this usually consists of listening to heart, lungs and stomach, checking for pulses and pain and a general "does this kid look good or does this kid look bad?" We are required to assess each of our patients every four hours. Seems like a lot, right? But the scary thing about taking care of kids is that they are very good at masking any signs of distress for a long time. For example: when adults are heading towards a state of shock, usually their blood pressures will be the first thing to bottom out. In kids, the blood pressure is usually the last thing to bottom out because they are just better than us at trying to stay healthy. But when kids get really sick, they get there really fast. Thus the reason for assessments every four hours.

In-between assessment my time is taken up by administering medications, helping kids out of bed for a walk down the hall, changing diapers, trying but usually failing to fix the defective Xbox 360s we have in every room, calling doctors, paging doctors, administering medications, helping kids to the bathroom, administering medications, charting, charting and more charting, laughing with co-workers, calling the pharmacy to clarify questions about medications, talking with families, drawing blood, hanging IV fluids, playing with my patients, measuring urine output (we seem to be obsessed with this in the medical world, but it can tell you a lot about a patient) teaching parents about taking care of their child at home, and at times, stressing out between all the things I have going on.

At 1850, the night nurses are back and its time for me to talk to them about my patients and how they did during the day (its much more detailed than that, but that’s the jist of it). I'm usually in my car and driving home by 1930 and home by 2000. It's a long day, but let me tell you there is never a dull moment or lack of things to learn. The 12 hours just seems to fly by. It's busy, stressful and tiring, but for the most part, fun and very rewarding.

Four years and two little letters later, and that's what I do.