As much as I love having nothing more pressing to do than cut trails through the woods and teach Dad and Julie how to use technology, my life plan reqires me to find a job as a nurse in an intensive care unit (ICU). As of November 15th I will have the nurse part covered, I am still working on the job part... Here is my dilemma: when you are a nurse in an ICU you care for only one or two patients at a time because they are so sick that they require all of your attention and brain power, if you live in a small town (such as Stormville) and by extension work at a small community hospital, you cannot start working in an ICU until you have a year of experience as a floor nurse. This is because smaller hospitals have smaller ICUs which employ fewer nurses who are so busy that they can't be expected to train a brand spankin' new graduate nurse (yours truly) on top of caring for their patients. I can see how this argument has merit, but I HATE working on the floor. The floor is where the nursing shortage is, since these patients are less critical they don't require as much individualized care (like complicated dressing changes) and as a result, floor nurses can be assigned as many as eight patients at a time - so you don't do cool stuff AND you have to do eight times the paperwork! I feel like nothing more than a giant pain pill dispenser when I work on the floor! The only way to avoid working on the floor and get directly into an ICU is by getting a job at a bigger hospital where they can afford to run special training programs for new graduates who want to work in ICUs. Bigger hospitals also have bigger ICUs meaning more patients to learn on and more nurses to learn from. So this past week I flew to Los Angeles to interview for jobs at UCLA and Cedars-Sinai. UCLA is a big teaching hospital with a great ICU training program, Cedars also has a training program AND it is where all the famous people go when they get sick ;) I stayed with one of my sorority sisters, Ashley, who works as a nurse at UCLA. I interviewed at both hospitals on Tuesday and then on Wednesday we took a tour around the city and got to see all the cheesy tourist stuff like the big Hollywood sign, Rodeo Drive and famous people's houses - it was awesome. My favorite part was Grauman's Chinese theatre where all the stars have their handprints and footprints because I found the prints for all the Harry Potter actors! You will be happy to know that my hands are the EXACT same size as Harry Potter's, now all I need is for my scar (from the stick incident) to get a little bigger and a little more lightning bolt shaped...
As much as I love having nothing more pressing to do than cut trails through the woods and teach Dad and Julie how to use technology, my life plan reqires me to find a job as a nurse in an intensive care unit (ICU). As of November 15th I will have the nurse part covered, I am still working on the job part... Here is my dilemma: when you are a nurse in an ICU you care for only one or two patients at a time because they are so sick that they require all of your attention and brain power, if you live in a small town (such as Stormville) and by extension work at a small community hospital, you cannot start working in an ICU until you have a year of experience as a floor nurse. This is because smaller hospitals have smaller ICUs which employ fewer nurses who are so busy that they can't be expected to train a brand spankin' new graduate nurse (yours truly) on top of caring for their patients. I can see how this argument has merit, but I HATE working on the floor. The floor is where the nursing shortage is, since these patients are less critical they don't require as much individualized care (like complicated dressing changes) and as a result, floor nurses can be assigned as many as eight patients at a time - so you don't do cool stuff AND you have to do eight times the paperwork! I feel like nothing more than a giant pain pill dispenser when I work on the floor! The only way to avoid working on the floor and get directly into an ICU is by getting a job at a bigger hospital where they can afford to run special training programs for new graduates who want to work in ICUs. Bigger hospitals also have bigger ICUs meaning more patients to learn on and more nurses to learn from. So this past week I flew to Los Angeles to interview for jobs at UCLA and Cedars-Sinai. UCLA is a big teaching hospital with a great ICU training program, Cedars also has a training program AND it is where all the famous people go when they get sick ;) I stayed with one of my sorority sisters, Ashley, who works as a nurse at UCLA. I interviewed at both hospitals on Tuesday and then on Wednesday we took a tour around the city and got to see all the cheesy tourist stuff like the big Hollywood sign, Rodeo Drive and famous people's houses - it was awesome. My favorite part was Grauman's Chinese theatre where all the stars have their handprints and footprints because I found the prints for all the Harry Potter actors! You will be happy to know that my hands are the EXACT same size as Harry Potter's, now all I need is for my scar (from the stick incident) to get a little bigger and a little more lightning bolt shaped...
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