One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other

.......Let us bow our heads in a moment of respectful silence for the football team of Purdue University, Indiana, who got their gluteus maximi KICKED by the Fighing Irish of Notre Dame!!!! Whooo hoooo! Apparently Purdue gave a football game and the team forgot to show up (figuratively speaking). NOTRE DAME ROCKS!!!!
(silence)
To those who are students or alumni of Purdue, my sympathies. Go Irish......



You can be a Trained Nurse. As opposed to what, an untrained nurse? This reminds me of something one of my nursing instructors said to me during my very first quarter of nursing school. Claudia was the epitome of the tall, cool professional. I secretly wanted to be just like her when I grew up (and I mean "grew up"...I was 18). My partner and I had managed to make a hospital bed within the required five minutes during our first skills lab and I joked, "....another exciting development in medical science". She immediately informed me that it was nursing science, separate and distinct from medicine. So I said, "...okay, another exciting development for nurses' training!" At which point she intoned that dogs are trained, nurses are educated. Well, I felt like an idiot but I never forgot what she said.

This came back to me recently as I listened to a group of my colleagues try to talk a pre-med student into nursing instead of medicine. They brought up many arguments. Nursing school could take as few as two or three years instead of eight (including residency). Nurses can work part-time with benefits. The pay is good. You can work in many different areas during your career as opposed to specializing in just one. Okay, all of those things are true...but then they said that nursing was easier; why go through all the bull of medical school when nursing was so....doable? After I picked my jaw up off the desk, I had to open my mouth.

I told the student that becoming a nurse was only the right thing to do if she wanted to practice nursing. Yes, they are related, but medicine and nursing are not the same profession. Nursing isn't something you do if you don't feel like going to medical school. I asked her what she wanted to study. Did she want to focus on the diagnosing and treatment of illness? Did she want to care for patients, assessing, planning, implementing and evaluating their responses to their treatment, both physical and emotionally on a daily basis? Doctors see their patients sporadically. Nurses spend up to twelve hours at a time with those same patients. Doctors set up the medical plan of care. Nurses set up a nursing care plan that supports and enhances the patient's ability to heal, that recognizes and helps the patient cope with the impact of the diagnosis in all areas of their life.

Well, that sort of threw a bucket of water on the conversation, but I thought I should say something. I'm all for recruiting nurses, but not by promoting it as a second-choice to medical school. Nursing is its own discipline.

Gee, I guess I grew up to be a little like Claudia, after all.