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Nurses: Do you have an exit strategy?

A slightly disturbing thing that I noticed this summer was the amount of nurses who have an exit strategy for leaving the bedside. It seemed like the majority of nurses I worked with were planning their exodus from bedside nursing in the form of CRNA school, NP school, or perhaps even just getting a MSN in order to obtain a more administrative role.

It certainly doesn't leave one with much hope for the profession. I wonder if other professions experience this phenomenom (i.e. how is the best way to put in my 2 years of drudgery and then advance?)

On the other hand, one thing I noticed was the advantages of raising a family when one parent is a nurse, because there is such a variety of shifts you can work. Here are some examples - these are all people I know:

• A nurse who does home health care during the day so she can be home when her kids come home from school.

• A nurse who works 4 weekend ICU shifts a month and spends the rest of her time staying home with her young children.

• A nurse manager who works M-F, 9-5 and has her kids in day care.

• A male nurse who works nights and weekends so his wife (also a nurse) can stay home with the kids

• A female nurse who works agency so her husband can stay home with the kids

• A nurse who mostly stays at home with her child but picks up contracts here and there when the family finances call for it (guess who that one is!)

• And I know a plethora of nurses who do the conventional ICU schedule (every other weekend, rotating days and nights) while raising a family with a spouse who quite often works an opposite schedule.

This last option is hard. Extremely hard. But if planned right, it can work to maximize the time that your family spends together.

I remember reading in one of my nursing theory textbooks that these types of nurses who fall in and out of the profession and will only work full time when it's convenient for them and their family are very bad for nursing. They don't contribute at all to advancing the cause of obtaining more power and respect for the profession.

And yet where would nursing be without them? For the most part they are the ones who aren't working on an exit strategy, because it all works out so well for them.

So this could be a problem...

I want to live in Douglas Coupland's house

Things to remember about nursing

This summer, I came away from my MICU contract with a renewed understanding of why I have this love-hate relationship with nursing. And I've summed it up in 6 simple points so when I'm ready to pick up another contract I can remember what to expect, even if months and months of super intense child rearing washes it all out of my head.

So here goes. The love part...

1. It's the feeling you get after the shift that is so great. You made it. You got through this grueling, back breaking, nerve wracking day. It's a feeling of accomplishment.
2. It's the social interaction. The camaraderie. There is definitely a bond there among nurses. No matter how different a fellow nurse is from you they know exactly what it is that you go through. And for many of us, you can't say the same thing about your family, your spouse, or your best friend.  
3. Then there's just the joy of knowing a difficult job really, really well. Being able to field any curve ball that comes your way in an extremely fast paced environment. Not to mention the fact that people could die if you don't do the right thing. While that may sound like an enormous amount of pressure, it's also a great source of pride to know that you can handle that.

And the hate part...

1. Night shift - Love, love, love the people who work night shift. But I hate the fact that switching from days to nights makes me feel like a human slug.
2. Lower back pain. No need to elaborate here.
3. Cleaning up stool. Sorry. it sucks no matter how you slice it. Some will say "Oh it doesn't bother me at all! You get used to it." Bullshit. You have 2 ICU patients, each stooling 3-4 times during the night in a 12 hour shift. You do the math. That means you are potentially up to your elbows in shit Q 2 hrs. AND trying to get the rest of your work done.

yogagirl

Am I throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Shane pointed out that staying on top of Wordpress updates is a small cost for being able to use such a great blog management system. I used to think this was true until I read this, from Donncha O Caoimh's blog (one of the developers at WP):

Unfortunately for some who did upgrade, it was too late. The hacker slimeballs may have known about the security issues before we did and went about their merry way breaking into blogs and websites, grabbing usernames and passwords, and planting backdoor scripts to log them in again at a later date.

That’s how even diligently upgraded blogs were hacked. The bad guys got there before you.

So that pretty much scared the crap out of me. These wordpress security issues are only going to get worse. I know that anything can get hacked (especially anything open-sourced) but Wordpress's popularity makes it a huge target.

And as for the value of the 28,000+ incoming links I've manged to build up? I'm willing to let them go, *poof* just like that. I think I'll tell you why in another post.

 

The last year of Polaroid film

Plan B

Okay, so I may have jumped the gun a bit. In my haste to redirect the domain "pixelrn.com" to posterous I've lost the ability to access my email and ftp. Can I have a redirect and still keep my email and ftp? Probably, yes, but it would involve fooling around with my DNS settings, which is a little over my head for now.

Other concerns:

Since I imported all of my blog posts to posterous, they now contain oodles of broken links, so if I don't want to annoy the google gods, I will have to manually fix them. (I also have to go back and re-tag everything so I have a nice little searchable tag structure that applies to my previous content.)

Google's already hating on me for the vile hidden viagra links so for now I won't worry about it.

My solution:

I'm nixing the redirect to posterous. Instead, I'll create a pretty little landing page on pixelrn.com that links to my posterous site and then I'll try and come up with Plan B.

And another thought... if I start blogging here permanently I don't think there's a way to export the the blog. That could be a huge problem if

(a) posterous starts getting hacked or

(b) posterous decides to sell out to facebook.

*sigh*

Sometimes I wonder if maybe I should just go back to using a pen and notebook.