I have wanted to be a nurse since high school and I have never regretted going into nursing school or have wanted to do anything else. So, when people ask me what I think about nursing I have mostly positive things to say. I tell them the opportunity to work 3 days a week is an amazing schedule. There is still time to have a life and travel without being locked down working 5 days a week. The money is good and helping people for a career is rewarding. I meet a lot of interesting people that like to tell their life stories. Some are interesting and some make you wonder what the heck they are talking about. Some people don’t like to converse very much or are unable to speak during some point in their hospital stay, and others won’t let  you leave the room. At that point sometimes you have to say, “i’ll be right back”, just so you can go see your other patients. I do realize that I am there for the patient so I usually try and make them feel comfortable by asking them questions about themselves. I think it’s important to make that connection with people when at that moment they just need someone to talk to and make them feel comforted. When I was in the hospital for 4 days with a pelvic fracture from a car accident, I remember one nurse having an impact on me, which was only one of the days I was there.  Her name was Jan and I remember that because she is the only nurse that talked to me and bathed me. She washed my legs, which I could not bend down to wash and she asked me questions while she was doing her assessment. I liked her at that moment and thought she was a great nurse for taking the time to talk to me, even though I know she was busy and I didn’t need a lot of care. My perception of the other nurses I had was that they thought I was an otherwise healthy young girl that didn’t need any nursing care and the aid could tend to all my needs.  I thought this because I never saw any of the other nurses. Maybe I never saw them because they were having a potluck in the lounge… Come on nurses, you know what I’m talking about! I was in nursing school at the time of my hospitalization, so I was observing the nurse’s behaviors and it didn’t bother me that they didn’t come check on me, but I was hoping to learn something from them. As a nursing student, I worked with this nurse at the hospital I was a patient in and due to her harsh, unfriendly behavior I was glad she was not my nurse. She was scary and I know she hated nursing students. I remember being upset one time because a patient was cussing at me and that was the first time I had experienced that. So, she walks by with her attitude and says, “welcome to nursing” and walks away. I’m not sure how she treated her patients, but I knew I did not want to have an attitude like her and potentially scare my patients. So, in my nursing career I want to be that nurse that the patients like and remember because I took the time to provide great care and go beyond the daily routine of assessments and passing medication.

This post on Life with Lydia made me reconsider my plan to wean G by May.  I’m not sure I want to miss out on his thoughts on breastfeeding.  I mean, he lets me know he likes it, of course, but it would be so fun to share the experience with him when he can express himself a little better.

Then again, 90% of the time I feel like I want to be done.  And I want to be able to go away for a few days when my parents are visiting.  Oh man.  Decisions, decisions…

GENTIAN VIOLET

Thrush.  The bane of my existence.  For three months Miss S and I did battle with it using Nystatin, until one day the Public Health Nurse suggested Gentian Violet.

Gentian Violet (1% solution) is purple… so VERY purple.  It temporarily stains skin, which is wonderful (not) when painting it into a squirming 6-month-old’s mouth.  Never mind the fact your own chest turns purple in the process.  Very sexy.

Miss S looked like a punk rocker, with her purple lips and naturally occurring mohawk.  Naturally I took pictures, but it still made me cringe every time I dipped the Q-Tip into the bottle.  Especially since the warning label states:  May irritate eyes, skin and mucous membranes.  May be harmful if swallowed.

Along with the Gentian Violet, I disinfected all of the toys Miss S had come into contact with and ran my bras through a daily vinegar hot water cleanse.  It felt like a mountain of work at first, but four days later we were thrush free.  Yes, that’s right: FOUR DAYS as opposed to the THREE MONTHS we’d been battling it previous – hooray, but arg.

PEDIATRIC CHIROPRACTOR

Miss S howls when we put her in her carseat.  She wails when we put her in jackets and shirts.  Normal baby behaviour?  Probably.  But just to make sure she couldn’t turn around and write a “Mommy Dearest” novel about how her parents ignored her pain, I took her to a pediatric chiropractor for a check-up.

Holy cow.  Let’s just say this was potentially the best $40.00 I’d spend in a looong while.

The chiropractor was awesome.  So quietly attentive to Miss S.  Her adjustments were subtle.  It just looked like she was walking her fingers under Miss S, and sometimes rocking her.  For her part, Miss S lay on her back, on a blanket, and played with stuffed farm animals.  (I think Miss S was happy to have the toys all to herself.)

Even though the chiropractor found nothing wrong with her shoulders, she made some other adjustments to help with gas (the bane of Miss S’s existence).  Didn’t even know gas was in the chiropractic realm, but it makes sense, and I’m grateful.

It’s only been one treatment, and yes, with babies you can never 100% guarantee anything.  BUT, here are the changes I’ve witnessed in the last 12 hours:

1. Appetite.  Miss S is hungry.
2. Burping and Farting.  She is no longer holding onto them for hours on end.  She eats, she burps.  Badda-Bing Badda-Boom.
3. Lying on her right side to nurse.  She actually is doing this without fussing.
4. Sleeping.  Here it is 2.5 hours after I placed her in her crib and she’s still asleep.  Has not woken once on account of gas pains (as has been her norm for the last 6.75 months of her life).

Clearly the night is still young.  I have not exhaled and tucked myself into bed.  But for now, this moment, my baby is peacefully slumbering.

It was almost 2 months or 60 days to be exact of stressful and anxiety-provoking experiences before the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) finally decided to release the much awaited exam result of this land – The November 29 and 30, 2009 Nurses Licensure Examination result. About 37,527 board takers or 39.7% survived the nerve-wrecking NLE. I jolted in surprise & couldn’t stop my tears running on my cheeks as i saw my name in the list of NLE passers on the Inquirer website last January 30, 2010. I couldn’t believed myself I belong to these survivors and now here i am – a full-pledge Philippine Registered Nurse. Lucky Me! hehehe!

This morning, about 1,000 new nurses from Davao City and nearby regions gathered at the CAP auditorium for an oathtaking ceremony. Due to a large number of oathtakers, PRC decided to split the populations into morning and afternoon sessions. Parents & spectators were not allowed to enter the hall in this solemn ceremony, of course PRC would not want all of us to fall down during the event due to our huge numbers.

The oathtaking was attended by Hon. Marco Antonio Sto. Tomas, one of the member of the Board of Nursing.

1. Search PubMed using the following search terms:  Diabetes Mellitus, Type 1 AND nursing
2. Search Google Scholar using the following:    nursing “Diabetes Mellitus, Type 1″

This Chelsea restaurant has gone from brasserie to brassiere.

Chef Daniel Angerer is letting diners at Klee Brasserie munch on cheese made from his wife’s breast milk.

“It tastes like cow’s-milk cheese, kind of sweet,” he told The Post.

The flavor depends on what the cheese is served with — Angerer recommends a Riesling — and “what the mother eats,” said Angerer, who once bested Bobby Flay on TV’s “Iron Chef.”

Breast milk doesn’t curdle well due to its low protein content, so a little moo juice has to be added to round out the texture, Angerer said.

After blogging about his efforts with the human cheese, customers started demanding a sample, he said.

“The phone was ringing off the hook,” the chef said. “So I prepared a little canapé of breast-milk cheese with figs and Hungarian pepper.”

The response has been generally positive from those who’ve tried the cheese, although many customers are too squeamish to attempt it.

“I think a lot of the criticism has to do with the combination of sex and cheese, but . . . the breast is there to make food,” said Lori Mason, the chef’s wife.

Since the restaurant began offering customers a taste, Mason has been inundated with creepy queries, she said.

“Some people who clearly have issues have . . . e-mailed me saying, ‘I wasn’t breast-fed as a child, so can I taste your breast milk?’ ” she said.

Mason politely declines the offer.

“I’m not here to walk people through their psychological problems,” she said.

That said, Mason is now prodding her husband to make gelato.

After inquiries from The Post, health bigs said yesterday that even though department codes do not explicitly forbid the practice, they have advised Angerer to refrain from sharing his wife’s milk with the world.

“The restaurant knows that cheese made from breast milk is not for public consumption, whether sold or given away,” a spokeswoman for the city Department of Health said.

Would you try breast milk cheese? Will this be the next trend for foodies? Let me know what you think…

I never hold my children as they are. When I wrap my arms around them, they are, in my mind and in my arms, the little babies I gave birth to. They are the still the little bodies  I held when they cried and nursed to sleep. When I look into my 15 year old’s eyes I still see the innocent little soul she was the first time I looked. But they are not those little babies. They are children. They have grown and changed more than I ever expected. Without any effort on my part. I couldn’t stop them but I didn’t want to try either.

I nurtured them inside my body for nine months (ok, technically 10 months and my first two were actually 10 and a half months) and then I nursed them for the first year of their lives. With my first, it was beyond difficult. And painful. Yes, it hurt. Just one of the many, many pains that became bearable as motherhood progressed.  I wanted to quit, but I just couldn’t. There was such an intense feeling of pride within me that I had produced a human being  and now I had the natural ability to continue to sustain this life. All on my own!!! My body was incredible!!

I was so excited to be a mom. I read every book in our library about child birth, breastfeeding and child rearing. I watched every single tv show, I talked to every mom I knew and many I didn’t. No one was safe from me. If they had a baby, I was asking questions. I was accosting parents in stores, in restaurants, in public restrooms. I wanted to get all the information I could, lots of different opinions and points of view and then I could make up my mind what was going to be best for me and my family.

Nursing was my choice. In 1994, in a pretty conservative town, and being young, I was not well supported by my local society. Thank God for the nursing nazis. I remember a couple of nurses who supported me in all of my decisions. They were there after I had her, when we couldn’t quite get the hang of it and when I didn’t want her taken to the nursery. Everyone thought I was insane for wanting to keep her in the room with me. A couple of nurses thought she HAD to have a bottle of water and that I couldn’t possibly know what I was talking about because I was young. One even came in and told me I would get over this nursing thing in short order when I realized that it was going to tie me down. Tie me down? It was like she was speaking a foreign language. How could this baby, this sweet innocent tiny (well, 9 pounds…not that tiny) baby be looked upon already as a burden? I didn’t understand.

I still don’t. Babies don’t manipulate. They don’t lie around in their crib thinking of ways to piss off their mothers like crying every 20 minute or pooping out of their diaper. They cry because it is the only way they can communicate. If they could calmly lean over to their baby monitor and say “excuse me mother would you mind feeding me now as I am a bit hungry. Thanks ever so much” don’t you think they would? What a pain it would be to not have words to express ourselves AND to have to rely completely and totally on bigger humans to supply your every need. That would be terrifying!

The LaLeche League was my religion. I read the book and called the hotline. I educated myself on all of the specifics. How it works, why it works and why it is the best thing for baby and mother. I became a nursing nazi. I had total support from my family. Well, my mother was not on board at first. She just didn’t believe anyone, anywhere on earth could possibly exclusively nurse. She firmly believed that at some point formula was necessary. I firmly disagreed with her. She was actually the one who bought me the LaLeche League book. She became my biggest supporter. So much so that she became a nursing nazi herself and would promote nursing to her friend’s kids who were having babies. She used me as an example of how easy and right it was. She became a convert!!

Everyone I knew at the time was a nursing mother. I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t. In my world at that time, it was just the way it was. And then I made a friend who didn’t nurse. To be honest, it confused me. I hadn’t known anyone who didn’t at least attempt to nurse and then make some excuse and switch to bottle feeding. But this friend had never tried and didn’t desire to nurse her children. I was dumbfounded. She was totally confident in her choice to bottle feed and AND she didn’t feel the least bit threatened by my choice to breast feed! Like I said, my friends who had given up were always defending their choice. Not this friend. She knew herself and she had no guilt. Incredible!

She wasn’t the last of my friends to chose not to nurse. And it was mind expanding to have women in my life who make their own decisions. As good as I felt about my decisions when it came to child birth and child rearing, these women felt jut as good about theirs. I had to open my narrow mind to include the probability that some women may have a different view, a different idea of what it means to parent. And they are incredible moms. And they have incredible kids. Their boobs didn’t fall off and their kids didn’t get leukemia.

I am happy and confident in my choice of feeding my babies. I am content with their babyhood. I am no longer a nursing nazi (but I can still quote facts and figures). I have respect for moms who chose not to nurse. It is a personal decision. It is, because we live in a land and in a time where it can be a personal decision. I am completely for any and all women’s rights. And breast or bottle is a womans choice as clearly as any that we, as women, face. What was right for me and my babies may not be right for another. Situations vary and I can no longer be so arrogant as to think I know what is best for another when it comes to their child.

How I fed my babies wasn’t what changed my life. My babies are what changed my life. I have three happy, healthy, smart kids who would be totally grossed out to hear this story. But someday they will appreciate this. Nursing isn’t easy in the beginning, but neither is motherhood. Breastfeeding doesn’t make a mother. For that matter, birth doesn’t make a mother. Love, time, commitment, trust, attention….so many ingredients to making a mother. Whatever our choices, respect.

This week I started a new course in nursing school called Nursing Informatics. I honestly had been dreading this course for weeks because learning about computers is often very boring to me since I have grown up with technology all around me. From second grade on through the rest of my schooling I have had computer classes so when college level technology courses have come up I always feel that I am slightly above the curve when it comes to technology knowledge.

I have been pleasantly suprised in the first week of Nursing Informatics; I have learned so much! This course is truly on trend with where technology fits into our everyday lives personally and professionally. I started a Twitter account several months ago, however I never was really drawn to the social networking site since I am invested mainly in the use of Facebook. I saw the Twitter networking site to be redundant, however Nursing Informatics has changed my mind. With Facebook I just have friends that I went to grade school, high school and work with, whereas a whole new option in networking has been brought to Twitter. I was oblivious to the fact that via Twitter there were groups of nurses and other like-minded or interested people that could discuss ideas and new research!

During this first week of the course we have been talking about Clinical Information Systems, which was a term that I was totally unaware of until now. As definied by our book

A clinical information system (CIS) is a technology based system that is applied at the point of care and is designed to support to acquisition and processing of information as well as providing storage and processing capabilities

As an employee at St. John’s Hospital I have become more familiar with CIS and the electronic health record. EPIC came to St. John’s last year, which is our program used for maintaining nearly all of a patient’s health records. A questions that was posed by my instructor in Nursing Informatics was “Who does the electronic health record belong to?”, but she is not the only person who has brought this question to my attention. At our staff meeting on 7B a few months ago it was brought up that a patient that we were caring for felt that the electronic health record was infringing on her privacy.

So, I asked myself, “Who does the EHR REALLY belong to?”. I’ve always seen my health history and information as something that I own, for if it wasn’t for me there would not be that written history to possess. Yet, I have never viewed this information in it’s entirety as it is displayed in EPIC or any form for that matter. As employees we cannot view any patient’s records without cause, nor can we view our own information. But why is it that we cannot view our own information, since it is indeed OUR health history and information?

The question of who owns the EHR may be more in the forefront now, however who owned the paper chart when that was our way of charting and organizing the information? The charts in the units I was a part of prior to the switch to EPIC were always kept at the nurses station, therefore even then was the information truly that of the patient’s, or was it property of the hospital?

As much as I would like to think that one’s own health record was their own, it seems more as if the EHR is the property of the health system. As I’ve been writing this entry, I was reminded of a news report I saw on KY3 just a few days ago regarding health records. The article can be viewed at: http://www.ky3.com/news/local/86329142.html

The article discusses how CMH in Bolivar is giving access to patient’s heath records through GoogleHealth. This new advancement in technology allows patient’s to have a centralized location that they can access themselves which houses all of their health information from CMH, and with continued use of the service, may have the capability of other health care systems adding their information to the net. With this article in mind, it would again bring me to the conclusion that the patient does not own their information, it is that of the health system and they are just being allowed to view it.

I’m looking forward to sharing more of my ideas and information that I have come across throughout this course. I can only hope that all of you out there on the net are that excited to hear my ideas as well!

McGonigle, Dee, & Mastrian, Kathleen. (2008). Nursing informatics and the foundation of knowledge. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.

Placement.

Even the word fills me with… some unpleasant feeling.

Don’t get me wrong; the staff are generally very nice. Everyone is very accommodating and takes an interest in the three students which currently plague their now slightly more-hectic-than-normal ward.

But I started my ward placement with hesitation. Much like my first ward placement, this one also had a welcoming gift for me – another infectious illness circulating the airwaves. The dreaded norovirus, or “winter vomiting bug.”

And despite all my vigorous hand washing, gloving and gowning up, and my first week of v&d freedom, I still succumbed to the virus. Just in time to wave good-bye to my chances of going to the Carbisdale ER weekend.

Not impressed.

Why could I not have suffered it a week ago, when all I would have missed were a couple of night shifts?

No, I had to get it now, so a whole weekend of Carbisdale banter had to be missed. Was absolutely gutted, and still am.

I’ve heard that everyone generally had a super time, which I’m glad of. These ER weekends are always good fun and a well needed challenge sometimes, especially when the usual duties haven’t been keeping your skills ship-shape and ready for action.

But I still missed it, and for that I’m sore. So I’m not even going to comment on placement just now, especially as my stomach is still reeling.

What I will say though, is thank you to everyone who has so kindly asked after me over the past few days. A couple of mates managed to fetch me some much-needed goods and spare some of their company, which has been well appreciated. Defo feeling the love folks!

I also now appreciate Dave (the TV channel, not a man named this) and its constant “Top Gear” re-runs, which make a decent excuse for day-time TV. A fair alternative to Jeremy Kyle and other similar day-time favourites. Thank you “Freeview” =]

Now to enjoy the lull of recovery before I return to the clinical world, with the hopes that I won’t fall ill for anything else enjoyable which is coming up in the next couple of weeks…