:-D

Conversation I had yesterday afternoon with 2 doctors who have previously worked on our unit:

Andy (to my roommate Caroline in regards to working as a nurse on 6 Bles): "So are you off orientation and all that?"
Caroline: "Yeah..."
Me: "Of course, seeing as she's been there for a year now."
Andy: "She's already been there for a year? How long have you been there?"
Me: "A year."
Andy: "You guys started at the same time?"
Me: "Yeah. We both started in July."
Matt: "Wait! You just started last year?"
Me: "Yeah. You didn't know that? I'm technically still a new grad. We actually started when you guys started."
Matt: "I didnt know that! I didnt think you were new."

Later that night....

Me: "I cant believe you didnt know I was a new grad."
Matt: "Yeah, I had no idea."
Me: "Well, I guess that's a good thing right? That you couldnt tell I was new?"
Matt: "No, absolutely. You didnt seem like it."
Me: "Really? Well good, that makes me feel better about myself, about me as a nurse."
Matt: "Oh yeah, definitely. You're a good nurse! I never would've thought you were new!"

:) Totally made my day. :)

Just another Tuesday

Last night I decided to go out with my friends C & L. Nothing too crazy seeing as it was a Tuesday night AND I had to work today (7a-7p). ...Or so I thought... It started out pretty calm, just hanging out drinking a few drinks out at one bar and when it closed at midnight because there was no one there, we walked down the street to another bar. Then somehow all the drinks we were drinking started to catch up to us. Our other friends M, A, and their friend B came and met up with us and they were hammered so everyone just fed off each others' energy and had such a great time. It was awesome! ...Highlights:

• Happy drunks
  
• Laughing. A LOT. I dont even remember what was said but I just remember laughing ALL night long.
• the GIANT St. Bernard outside of the bar. I'm talking, literally this dog is bigger than I am. He was super friendly. We played with it.
• Drunk dancing (in a virtually empty bar)
• Making friends with the bartender. And by 'making friends with' I mean he just laughed at us because of our ridiculous drunkenness.
• Good (drunk) conversations
• Making A take shots.
• Lisa making out with my neck
  
• M: "Are these croutons??" Bartender: "um, they're sugars cubes."
  
• Conversation where I try to convince M that scruff is sexy.
• playful flirting
• M publicly cupping my breasts
  
• M & L imitating Lee (our very loud doctor who I'm pretty sure legitimately has a speech impediment)
• Trying to convince M that med students should do a rotation with the nursing staff. (i mean seriously, how has this not already been implemented??)
• M trying to explain to me why he's bombass and wicked smart for getting matched in Urology
  
• Spinach & artichoke dip at 3am
• M & I making fun of C and her loudness
• PDA ;)

Last night was epic. Based on our antics and drunkenness, you would've thought it was a Friday night. I felt like death when I woke up and had to go to work this morning (and it didnt help that M laughed at me and got to go back to sleep). Totally worth it though. I cant remember the last time I had such an epic night.

'Suuuupp.

My little cousin (and godson) Aldrich. He's already 5 and starting kindergarten in the fall! Love him. :)

Philippines (cont)

Instead of writing a post of everything I did in the Philippines, you can just refer to my facebook page whenever I post pictures. There are a TON of them. You'll get the idea of all the places I went from there. For now, I'll just list how life in the Philippines is different from city life here. (fyi: where my family lives is a small suburb called Morong, Rizal so life there would still differ from say, life in Manila but just so you get a sense of what we experienced)

• Everything (except chocolate) is so cheap. The currency is the Peso and at the time we were there, the exchanges rate hovered around $1 = 46 Pesos. When we converted things, stuff came out to $8 mani/pedis, $1.10 haircuts, anywhere from $0.75-$3 for jewelry, $1 for a beer, $98 for one night in a hotel suite in the city, etc etc. Of course, its a poor country; they dont make as much there so cost of living isnt as expensive as here and such so its hard to compare sometimes.
  
• Traffic patterns. There are no traffic patterns. People weave in and out of lanes, they honk as a way of saying, "out of my way, I'm coming through," people just walk out into the street expecting the cars to stop - and they do. People may drive like crazy, but no one gets mad. You can stop right in the middle of the road and other cars would just drive around you.
  
• There is no central air. The houses that are fortunate enough to have air conditioners have units in individual rooms and its typically only 1, maybe 2 bedrooms, in the entire house that have A/C. (I'm glad we went during the hottest recorded summer ever.)
  
• There is no hot water. Downtown in the city, hotels, restaurants, etc have hot water but I'm not sure about the homes there. In our town, in our house, there is no hot water. Not that you really need hot water since is so freakin' hot, so sometimes a slightly cool shower is refreshing, but even in the heat, you'd like for a least a lukewarm shower every now and then.
  
• The security check at the airport has a separate line for Males and Females
• McDonald's serves rice
• Bars stay open all night
• Orange Juice is the most expensive beverage to order (yes, more expensive than beer, even more expensive than a Long Island)
  
• They have different models of cars there. We saw a car that we thought was a Honda Civic, but it was actually a Honda "something-or-another-that-I-have-never-heard-of-and-doesnt-exist-in-the-US." In fact very most of the cars they have there, we dont have here.
  
• Movie theaters have assigned seats! When you buy your ticket at the counter, they show you a seating chart and you pick which seats you want (like you would for tix to a concert or a sports game)
• They dont sell cold milk. They sell things like Yoohoo (although I never actually saw the Yoohoo brand) and such that are just in cartons or cans and can be kept on the shelf/pantry.
• They dont have cabs/taxis, they have tricycles. They dont have metro buses, they have Jeepnies.
  
• They play Glee songs on the radio. :)
  
• Nurses still wear white scrubs. (I'll post about my experience walking through the local hospital later)

Anyway, thats all that I can really think of for now... I'll try to think of more later.

Philippines (Part 1)

We're leaving the Philippines and making our way back to the US tonight. The travel time including lay-overs will be about 24 hours (woohoo!) but because of the time difference, we will leave 12:30am Thursday morning and land in DC at about noon Thursday afternoon. I'll post again once I upload pictures and have more time to write, but for now listing will have to do.

Things I am looking forward to coming back to:

• cooler, less humid weather
• air conditioning
• running / working out
• baseball and all the rest of US sports
  
• salads
• not having to put on bug spray every time we leave the house
  

Things I will miss here:

• Lolo ("grandpa")
• All the fam and cousins
• the vacation style (going back to work the day after I return will not be fun)
• home-cooked meals every meal
  
• the pastries, fresh fruit, and food in general
  
• the much cheaper cost of everything here
• the in-home mani/pedi's and massages
• the ability to walk everywhere
• the small-town lifestyle

siiigh, back to the real world soon...

A (late) Nurses' Week post

An old man walking along the beach at sunrise came upon a young man sifting through the debris left by the night's tide. Every now and then, he would pick up a starfish and fling it back to the sea. The old man asked him the purpose of his efforts. "The tide has washed the starfish onto the beach. They will die unless I throw them back." The old man looked around at the miles of beach. "There are more starfish than you could ever save. Surely you cannot expect to make a difference." The young man bent to pick up another starfish. As he sent the starfish sailing back to the water, he said to the old man, "It made a difference for that one."

This week we had our New Grad Pinning Ceremony, basically to mark the fact that we've been nurses for almost a year. I can't believe its been almost a year! It seriously has flown by! Sometimes I still feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. In honor of the near-year mark, this is the list of things I've been able to check-off my Nursing Skills To-Do List:

• foley insertion (on both a male and female)
• NG tube insertion
• administer certain chemo drugs
• had a patient go crazy on me and therefore put him in 4-point restraints
• accessed and de-accessed a Mediport
• wound care (GROSS.)
  
• changed multiple ostomy appliances: your standard one, double-barrel stoma, loop stoma, stomas with a bridge, etc
  
• enema (not necessarily something I was all that excited about crossing off)
• postmortem care (also something I wish I never had to do)
• Continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis
  
• coded a patient

Things left to do:

• witness/deal with a seizure patient (i'm absolutely terrified of this)
• suctioning / trach care (also WAY, WAY GROSS. ...but i gotta do it some time)

"Right now there is a nurse helping a woman become a Mom, a nurse holding the hand of a dying man, a nurse inserting an IV in a child, a nurse listening to an Alzheimer's patient tell a story, a nurse missing her family while caring for yours. In the minute it took you to read this, nurses all over the world are saving lives."

I love my job. :)

quarter life crisis

Ok, so its not really a "crisis" but recently I've been re-evaluating things. For one, EVERYONE is engaged/married. Seriously? And the ones who do not fall in this category are in serious relationships that will probably be taking the next step soon. When I was younger I pictured myself married at 27 or 28 and then having my first child at 30. If that were still going to be the case, then I would have to start dating my future husband, oh... last month. That's not to say that I want to be married just yet, because I dont. I cant picture myself as a wife right now or think about possibly having kids in the near future. But I'd like to be a step closer than I am. Because I'm not close at all. Not even a little bit. And dont get me wrong, I love my life. I love my friends. I have a great time and enjoy single life, etc. But sometimes it just gets old, you know. (Plus boys are stupid and frustrating, but thats another story)

Second, so many of my friends are going back to school and furthering their degrees. I know I just graduated and I'm still a new nurse, but people keep asking me, "what's next?" "When are you going back to school?" I have no idea what's next. I know I'll eventually go back to school but I have no idea when or for what. I know I need to do it relatively soon because I'd really like to be done with school by the time I'm 30, but at this rate I dont think that's going to happen.

Finally, my friend is going to Haiti with her mom (they're both nurses) and doing volunteer work. I want to do that. I want to make a difference. I want to make something of my life.

Mreh. I just feel so unaccomplished right now and I feel kinda lost since I dont have all these big life plans like everyone else does.

Scrubs

I dont understand the fascination boys have with girls in scrubs. I get the whole sexy/slutty nurse fantasy, but we dont dress like that. EVER. And they know that. This one guy says to me, "I'd kinda like to see you in your scrubs one day." And he's not the first to say that to me. But dont people (read: boys) realize that the scrubs we actually wear are not sexy. In fact, I dont even want to begin to imagine the kind of grossness that covers my scrubs. Also, I've seen what I look like at the end of a 12 hour shift. It is not attractive. Hell, I am not attractive at the start of my 12 hour shift. I literally roll out of bed, throw my hair up, and throw on scrubs. I run around and deal with MRSA infected patients who have poop coming out of them. I'm not gonna bother to look pretty. But for one reason or another, boys think nurses are hot. Its a mystery to me.

And scrubs absolutely look better on guys. I dont find scrubs to be a "turn-on" but I must say, there are definitely some guys who make the plain green standard hospital scrubs look good. Siiigh. ;)