Nursing Facts (that didn’t make any textbook cut)
1. Instinct will save your patient, it will save your coworker’s you’re covering for, and it will save your own ass.
2. If a doctor asks you to do something and it feels wrong, it probably is. See #1.
3. Patients lie, families lie, everybody lies.. sniff out the truth with your detective nose.
4. If you even mention you hate taking one type of case to a charge nurse you don’t get along with, guaranteed you will see nothing but those cases once word gets out.
5. Some of the strongest nurses, the people you would inherently trust with your patients, your family, your loved ones, yourself with - aren’t preceptors, they aren’t charge nurses, they are likely the neighboring nurse who never gets the unit award, but everyone wishes silently would be the nurse if they were to ever look up frightened from a stretcher.
6. Half the shit you do in Nursing school isn’t reality, and you won’t always have time to do it in the same way; but that doesn’t mean you’re compromising care, quality or integrity of your profession. It just means you’ve found a more proficient, effective, and just as safe way to do it that textbook authors won’t admit to.
7. You do actually have a choice to speak up when someone is intensely rude to you, despite what surveyors, management, and all the circus of politically correct people will tell you - there isn’t a law or standard of practice in nursing that says take all the crap from people and stay silent. Setting boundaries with patients, families, and coworkers doesn’t mean you’re disrespectful, it means you respect yourself and your place in this profession.
8. Protect your patients, but protect your license just as hard - you can’t protect anyone if you’re not protecting yourself.
9. Nursing management often complains the loudest about things they’ve forgotten how to do themselves.
10. You can make mistakes, have a snitty day, be off point, miss all the IV’s, miss a subtle sign in diagnosis, and wish you’d chosen another career - but it doesn’t take away from the days that you’re the one to catch someone’s error before it harms their patient, or their license, it doesn’t take away from the days when you sort of think in the back of your mind, I simply love what I do, it doesn’t take away from the all the times you snagged an impossible IV, but no one really needed to see it for it to feel good, it doesn’t take away from all the moments you caught subtleties that made you remember why nursing is a vital piece of hospital function, and it doesn’t take away from the moments you reminded yourself that hey, it’s a good thing to stick with this profession that you never quite know what to expect of next.
And none of that will ever make any textbook.
