Allow myself to introduce....myself.....

My name is Wendy. I am 38 years old. I am a real-live Miami Native. I was born here in 1969, and other than 4 years in North Carolina and one year in Europe, I have lived here my entire life. (Just so you know....real Miamians say "Y'all" not "Oy ye.") I graduated from nursing school 3/13/07. I have been working as a nurse since the day after I took my NCLEX. I work in pediatrics for several reasons:

1. The patients are lighter.
2. Fun pedi-prints!
3. I can handle whining and crying from a kid. Not so much from an adult.
4. Same for pooping, peeing, vomiting, etc. For some reason it is not nearly as bad coming from a kid as it would be from an adult.
5. My original career goal was to be a pre-school teacher. I actually was a nanny for a while (see Europe).
6. I really like working with kids. However, I am very happy to leave them at the end of my shift.
7. I love me some babies!!!! However, I am happy to leave them at the end of my shift, too.

I am married to a Puerto Rican (New Yorican) man. We have been married for nearly 16 years. We had a very rough patch for a while these past two years. But, I think we are going to make it, after all. Husband shall be known as W. or the Husbeast for this blog. He is the most frustrating person in my life. He also makes me laugh more than anyone I know. He makes me nuts, but I love him.

I am a mother of one 11 year old boy, who shall be known as D. for this Blog. D. is somewhere between boy and man at this point. He still loves cartoons, and toys, but girls are pretty interesting right now, too. He has impossibly high standards for girls. I guess that it is due to the fact that the first female he saw was Pamela Anderson on Baywatch as he was exiting the womb. D. is very artistic, sensitive, and funny. I love him more than anything in the world. He is my pride and joy, and the best gift I have ever gotten.

More to come.....

Tales of a Big City Hospital Nurse.....

I think I am going to change my blog title to the one above.

I work for a very, very large hospital in a very large city. I work in a pediatric transplant unit. I am a night-shifter. This environment is very different from the one that I spent my first months as a baby-nurse. The nurse dynamic is different. The relationship between management and staff nurses is something that has to be seen to be believed. (Maybe it is the union effect....)

I spent the first 10 months with 4-6 patients of varying degrees of acuity. Many nights there was no lunch break, much less time to pee. However, we had great teamwork, and camaraderie.

The current situtation is a 180. 3 patients per nurse, 1.5 hours of break per night, and I tend to be bored to tears. But that is orientation, I suppose. No real autonomy, yet. And scheduled medications (3 scheduled time periods per night - what a genius idea!) make for long stretches of nothing to do. I am chomping at the bit to get going already, but I need to stop or I will wind up with a shortened orientation period, and that worked out to 5 weeks of orientation for a brand new grad at my old hospital.

Anyway, I am going to treat this like a new blog. Starting over from scratch, so to speak. Next post, I will reintroduce myself.

Welcome to the tales of a Big City Hospital Nurse.

What a difference a year makes.....

So, I disappeared from the blog-osphere for a while. I needed to get my act together with the jump into the new career. Get used to the new schedule, learn a tremendous amount of information, and such. So, now here it is.... A year has gone by since I graduated nursing school. I have been a genuine RN for 10.5 months. Taking a look back, I can honestly say that I love what I do.

I spent the first 10 months working on a pediatrics floor at Broward General Medical Center. It was what I call soup-to-nuts nursing. On this floor, I took care of patients with a variety of diagnoses, everything you can imagine. I had patients as young as 5 days old, and as old as 20. I would usually have 5 patients per night, but the staffing was getting so bad, that towards the end, I had 6 patients more often than usual. From time to time, I would also work the pediatric hematology/oncology floor. This floor could be quite intense, because the patients could go bad at any time.

I grew to really appreciate my co-workers. I relied so heavily on their knowledge sometimes, and some were so accomodating. So, along with all the knowledge and experience I took away with me, I also left with some new friends.

Now, I have just moved to the HUGE HOSPITAL here in Miami, into the pediatric transplant surgical unit.