When Do You Know You’re Really a Nurse?
There's an imaginary line that one crosses when becoming a nurse. This line divides the floundering nursing student from the confident and experienced nurse.
Return on Investment: A Nurse’s Mother Makes Her Wishes Clear
By Margaret Gallagher, BSN, RN. Margaret is a cardiovascular nurse currently working in Georgia. This is her first post for this blog.
- Fly Away / jenny.nash712, via Flickr
My parents believed it was their obligation to educate their children. My sister and I both walked out with a college diploma and no debt. Susan went to a state university for her pharmacy degree, but I fell in love with a private nursing school. So my mother spent her inheritance on her own alma mater’s archrival because it was where I wanted to go. Mom got what she paid for, however, as I graduated with a BSN that has done more than just keep the roof over my head.
Shortly after I passed my boards, I planned a trip to visit my parents. I got report for my last shift, then walked in on a shouting match. My patient lay comatose between his two adult sons. Awareness of my presence brought a thick silence, followed by the younger son muttering an “excuse me” as he bulldozed his way out. After a pause, the remaining son searched my face as he began to speak.
“The doctors just told us today that Dad’s never going to get better than this. They asked us how far we […]
AJN’s Top 10 Blog Posts for the Last Quarter
At this blog we’re not always devoted practitioners of the art of the list. Used too often and too cynically (some of the more mysterious nursing blogs consist entirely of lists of articles and excerpts from other blogs), lists can be just another form of journalistic cannibalism.
But it sometimes occurs to me, as I publish a new post that takes its place at the top of the home page and pushes all those below down another notch (until, after a few such nudges, they gradually fall off the page, entering the purgatory of the blog archives), that this isn’t entirely fair.
While blogs allow for quick reaction to a news story, a public health emergency or controversy, a new bit of published research, they are also places for writing that isn’t so narrowly tied to a specific date and event. Many thoughtful posts by excellent writers have been published here in the past couple of years. With this in mind, here’s a list of the 10 most read blog posts for the past 90 days. It doesn’t mean that these are necessarily the very best posts we published in that time, or that they were even published in the last 90 days . . . but it’s one way of measuring relevance.—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor
1. Dispatches from the Alabama Tornado Zone
This one is actually a page with links to a series of powerful and thought-provoking posts by Susan Hassmiller, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, who volunteered with the Red Cross after the devastating Alabama tornadoes in late April of this year.
Caught in the Crossfire: The Debt Crisis and a Child’s Shooting in the Bronx
By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief—The one good thing about commuting into Manhattan is that I have plenty of time to listen to the news on the radio. This morning, there were two stories that topped local news and gave me food for thought while I negotiated traffic.
One, of course, is the current debacle in Congress over passing a bill to raise the debt ceiling, a necessary move to prevent the country from defaulting on payments. It was expected that a bill put forth by Republicans would have been passed in the House of Representatives on Thursday evening, but Speaker John Boehner did not put the bill forward because he couldn’t garner enough votes from a handful of conservative Republican colleagues who feel the bill doesn’t go far enough in limiting spending and are therefore unwilling to compromise.
What’s ridiculous about all the posturing around this bill is that if it passes in the House, the Democrats in the Senate have already said they will vote it down. So the Republican holdouts aren’t about outcomes, but about appearances. And it’s wasting time we don’t have. As everyone knows by now, a solution needs to happen by August 2. The financial markets have been showing the stress for the last five days (and if you think it doesn’t pertain to you, think retirement accounts, college funds, etc).
And it’s not just the U.S. financial markets—markets around the world are down. […]
Getting Osteoarthritis on Nurses’ Radar
Many providers and patients alike feel arthritis is inevitable and there’s nothing that can be done aside from taking pain medication—but that’s wrong. There are measures that can slow progression and make joint replacement a less inevitable outcome. The key is getting patients on regimens early on, before there is significant damage in the joint.