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Being a patient is a difficult task for me.
I’m used to being the leader, the provider, the organizer, the nurse, but never the patient.
But when the diagnosis of a brain tumor stops you dead in your tracks, you have no choice but to become a patient. Then again, I should know better. As Six Until Me and Chronic Babe have already taught me, We Are All Patients.
Nurses week is celebrated every year from May 6th until May 12th, which is also Florence Nightingale’s birthday. This static celebration has been in place since 1993 in order to facilitate better planning. This weeks serves as an opportunity to take special notice of the contributions that nurses make to the community. For a brief history on nurses week you can visit the American Nurses Association.
In my years of bedside care I often had to go outside of the 30 minute window for timed medications for the benefit of the patient. Most of the times these times are arbitrary anyhow. If a medication is ordered once per day it doesn’t really matter what time of day the patient gets it. It should fit within their normal routine not within what the pharmacy schedules it. I never once received any sort of reprimand for my medication timing. I often had to request the scheduled times for medications be changed by the pharmacy, but many times I had to give the medication at a different time and documented the reason why.
Recently I was hospitalized for a week in a large university hospital. In those 7 days only one of my nurses spoke English as a first language. The rest of the nurses had thick accents. I couldn’t pinpoint where exactly, but Haitian if I had to guess. Their accents made it difficult for me to understand them. I also noticed they often seemed to have difficulty understanding me. It was no uncommon for me to have to rephrase my questions or requests in order to get a response from them that was appropriate. Even after rephrasing my questions, their most common answer was “I’ll have to ask to doctor.”
So now that I have had the surgery and I am sitting at home, tumor free I have a wealth of emotion of commentary I need to filter through. I’ll be honest with the fact that I’m really quite annoyed to have had a brain tumor and had to deal with it. I think most people would be. But I’m also annoyed with other things and I am not sure if I have yet had the time to take into consideration all relevant information to make a decision about how I feel about many of the scenarios brought about by my pituitary macroadenoma and the surgery to remove it.
One of the primary pitfalls of nursing is the strong likelihood that you will have to work on holidays. While we all understand the need and importance of having to work holidays as a nurse, it does not take away from the fact that sometimes it’s just frustrating to be away from your family at these times.
The following infographic does a great job of illustrating the cost of various surgeries as well as detailing how many of that operations are performed in a year.
IT’s worth noting that cost for these procedures vary by region and also from facility to facility. What would be ideal was if a surgery cost $x.xx amount no matter where you had it or who performed it. But unfortunately that is just not so. Hospitals and insurance companies are constantly renegotiating their agreed upon allowances and changing what they determine is “reasonable and customary.”
What I found particularly interesting is that less that 5 hours of sleep can actually increase your risk of diabetes by as much as 2 1/2 times. It can also lead to increase in heart attack by 45%. In general it increases your risk of death by 12%. A 12% boost in death likelihood over a few hours of sleep every night. Pretty impactful.
Lack of sleep can also make you gain weight and feel lethargic. Your body goes into fight or flight mode and does not process food properly causing it to store excess fat. Over time the results of this can be noticeable and life impacting.
As you can see, the above infographic gives an excellent visual of how lack of sleep can contribute for various comorbidities that can certainly contribute to your early demise.
Nursing can be a monotonous and stressful profession. Your daily routine can become so persistent and the appreciation you feel for what you do often seems minimal. While there are some that feel the paycheck should be enough, there are others who picked nursing as their profession because they wanted more than just money in the bank.
Unfortunately, nurses often give of themselves to the point where they may begin to feel defeated. They may start asking themselves “Why did I start doing this?” “What made me want to be a nurse to begin with?” “Does what I do really matter?”
In order to prevent getting to this point as a nurse, it is important that you take steps to prevent burnout. In the process you will also help to improve nursing morale. It’s not hard. It’s just a matter of being proactive and positive.
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