The nursing life

Nursing is a thing of the past for me. It has been 2 years since I had my last duty, being behind the nurse's station and going through every client doing nursing stuffs. Whenever I make a patient smile with every little thing that I did, their positive vibes strengthen my personality, not just my personal features but also my professional attributes as well. Life as a nurse (student nurse or SN, I never get to live my life as a working RN) was complicated but it was worth the experience. Knowledge physicians usually possess are also innate within nurses. Nursing life was almost similar to the life of a physician, only with some differences. Nonetheless, nursing was a fun experience I took with me when I jumped ship and moved to another profession: Medicine.

The 8 hour duties of nurses are burdensome yet worth it, depending on the work environment and the current situation within the workstation. When I was a SN, life inside the hospital started with endorsements. Our RN preceptors receive clients (I'll mention patients instead of clients after this, I'm not used to saying clients anymore) from their predecessors from the previous shift and from there, the workload is divided between the RN and the SN. Some RN's give the lighter tasks to the SN's, but there are times that the workload between both nurses is just equal or, in some cases, carried more by the SN rather than the RN. After endorsement, the SN's task is to visit each patient and check that person's status. Checking the patient out initiates the assessment process, and from that moment on, the real work begins. For 8 hours, the SN's usual task was to check the patient's vital signs, give out medications, monitor IVF's, attend to the patient's needs, perform other procedures such as CBG monitoring, and endorsing issues to the preceptor/clinical instructor. Other fun things which we SN's did before was acting out as charge nurses, answer calls and relay information to resident physicians. Specialty procedures that SN's did before included assisting a surgical procedure, delivering babies, and taking care of newborns in the nursery. At the end of the shift, the SN's task was to endorse his/her patient to his/her preceptor, have a post-conference with the clinical instructor, then the shift ends.

The job was tasking but the memories were worth it. Being an SN clearly was worth the experience that can be brought anywhere from point A to point B and so on and so forth. Personally, the experience was the only thing that I brought with me when I entered Medicine. Whenever I think of Nursing, I'd just think of it as a thing of the past. But wherever I go, whatever I do, the nursing life always stays with me. That past life lives within me and shows its color through means of applying nursing knowledge while learning new and complicated topics only learned in medicine. I get to teach some group mates on med procedures that are exactly similar to nursing procedures. Truly, the nursing life is applicable to the medicine life that I now start to live. Though nursing is a past thing for me, this thing will always live on, even if I achieve my goal of becoming a doctor a few years from now.