I want it so bad i can taste it

have you ever wished for something so hard and soo bad?
Have you ever hated your wall calendar before because it makes you feel like it's a silent bomb, ticking away your precious days?

welcome to the club.

This june 6th and 7th i would be sitting through an anxiety-ladden, mind-boggling major examinations that would determine my career as an RN. it's a big step in my life--my Nurse Licensure Exams.
Honestly I am sOooo not prepared for it. i have, like 34 days to go, and here i am, STARING at my nursing books, waiting some divine intervention. How on earth am i supposed to read, memorize, master all the crazy nursing subjects that we have?

and hey, to think that the exams do have lucrative questions like:
What is the secret of a woman who ages gracefully?
and the choices are like: healthy lifestyle, supportive family, etc.

geez.reaally.

i guess i just have to pray hard huh?
and start browsing through my books. wahai.
wish me luck.
wish me ALL the luck.

me in my scrubs! all-smiles eventhough i was bone-weary.=D

of the grandma i would never see again, of twilight fever and the board exam fright

I've been way too busy these past few months, so i hope you would forgive me for not updating.

with all the subjects I'm taking and the nursing audit classes putting a toll on my too-human energy, i just couldn't ask my brain cells to work way overtime and write anything for me to post.

much happened to me these past four months:

first, my maternal grandmother, the one who has lung cancer, passed away last November 24. She died due to peritonitis, a complication. (remember she just had her chemotherapy, and her WBCs are down, so she was really in a very delicate state). I cried so much for a few days and even up to now, there's still this gnawing pain i feel whenever i remember her. My aunt consoled me at the wake and told me that "at least she's no longer in pain now." i know she's right. but still i'm selfish enough to wish that she's still here with us. I guess it's because i never really had the chance to tell her that I love her. Because all the time she was having her therapy, i kept on telling myself she would survive and in the end i really believed she really would, that i didn't see the need to tell her goodbye and that i loved her.

anyway,
twilight fever had become a pandemic. And i'm one of those inflicted with it. haha. But hey i think the ones who portrayed the Cullens in the movie really did well. The twilight books are evaporating so fast from ALL the bookstores, i was even surprised to see that the little bookstore near our house was jampacked with people buying twilight series, when in all of its existence, its customers never did exceeded five at a time. hmm.
and anywhere i go, there are people carrying, buying or reading the books: malls, trains, even on the bus and on the playground!

so what am i doing right now?
i'm watching the days flew by waiting. tick-tock-tick-tock.
waiting for me to graduate, get my nursing pin, start my review classes (im really confused where i should take my review for the board exam. there are like hundreds of review centers and they all seem the same to me), take and TOP the board exam (that's the spirit, right?).

and then, what? I-REALLY-REALLY-DONT-KNOW.
i guess i'll handle things one day at a time huh?=D

Protecting and Preserving the Nursing Profession

Since the dawn of yore nurses are thought of as mortal angels--- always with a lamp, caring, giving, and not thinking of one’s own ambitious gain. It is a service that has learned to endure various mockery and ridicules associated with it. Centuries have passed and science has evolved hundredfold, unravelling new ideas and innovative ways of preserving human life. And yet nurses remain a profession different from all others mainly due to a single entity commonly tagged as the mark of each and every nurse, the calling and the essence of being a nurse: compassion.

In the country alone, we have millions of licensed nurses. It has been a popular and sought after profession as of today. Some would think that the ballooning population must have been due to dire hopes of landing on a greener pasture; but for nurses like us who have come to love the profession despite of being forced by our parents, it is a calling. A calling so loud and clear it pervades through our very bones and is absorbed by our very soul.

The sad reality is that, in a country filled with world-renowned nurses, our very hospitals stink with its dark secrets. Secrets so dark they would have been thought of as absurd and fictional.

Tough luck for poor and pregnant moms.

"It's you again? Every year you give birth! After this you should have a ligation!" one health worker recalled hearing a male doctor scold a mother in the delivery room.

Getting no reply from the helpless woman, the doctor allegedly was heard mumbling to his assistants: "I hope the baby is dead."

"He got even more angry when he saw that the baby was alive."

The same doctor, graduate from a top medical school in the country, had also performed total abdominal hysterectomy on an unsuspecting mother after she delivered her sixth baby by cesarian section.

He had removed her uterus.

When the mother woke up, the doctor told her he had to perform hysterectomy because she was bleeding profusely.

"But she was never bleeding."

After reading the news article entitled “Dark Secrets Born in Delivery Rooms” published a several years back, I was speechless. Hundreds of emotions transpired in my Amygdala, ranging from rage to the health care professionals involved, then sympathy to the patients, and finally, disappointment to the current health care system. Flocks of nursing schools evolved in the past ten years. And it seemed as though only few of them has inculcated into their students the importance of being a conscientious and compassionate nurse far above the importance of passing the board exams and their NCLEX. Maybe, just maybe, if their Bioethics classes have somehow infiltrated their souls, these dark stories would never have been born at all.

In the pledge of the American Nurses Association, this is clearly stated: “The nurse’s primary commitment is the health, welfare and safety of the client.” Nurses should foresee the needs of the patient in order to restore their optimum level of functioning by eliminating all the expected and present stressors that can inflict harm to the patient health condition. As a health care practitioner, we also have an imposed obligation to promote health and welfare of the patient above other considerations. According to one of the Universal Principle of Biomedical Ethics which is Beneficence, nurses ought to prevent or remove evil or harm and promote good.

"I was shocked." he said. "It wasn't what we were taught in school about patient care. It was completely the opposite."

He recalled one instance when a mother delivered her eighth baby on a stretcher before she could be transferred to the delivery table. "The nurses got mad and said, Why didn't you tell us the baby was about to come out?"

To punish the woman, the nurses allegedly told her to move to the delivery table by herself.

Imagine the pain. You've just delivered [a baby] and you're asked to move with no assistance whatsoever.

In this case the patient is a multigravida, a mother in labour for the 8th time. Being a knowledgeable nurse, we learned that this condition of the mother, being a multiparrous, brought about several physiologic changes to the mother already. To enumerate some, a history of multiple deliveries may bring about weakening of the perineal muscles, a wider pelvic inlet and a shorter time for the dilatation and effacement to occur. Bearing these things in mind, the nurse should expect a faster rate of delivery. As what our clinical instructors once told us, we have to be faster than the fetus, because the fetus would not wait for us to get ready. He/She will come out when he/she wants to.

In the presented above factors, the patient has neither any account nor any liabilities in delivering the baby while she is still on the stretcher. No one has any control about that. Not even the nurse. So the nurse has no right to punish the mother for having a “fast and unwarned” delivery. To punish the mother by scolding, humiliating and telling her to transfer from the stretcher to the delivery table by herself after a spontaneous vaginal delivery is a perfect example of contradicting the Nightingale Pledge. It is a clear mockery to the nursing profession. The act is considered to be irrational and totally, irrevocably unjustifiable.

I am not an idealistic person, I am well aware of the flaws of the country's Health Care System. True, we lack technologies and the problem of medical supply shortage is something we have learned to deal with every day. But being a despicable and lousy excuse for a nurse is tantamount and even worse compared to all the aforementioned problems. I was not expecting a perfect world when I entered this profession. So did my batchmates. But we were all geared up with optimism: we can make a difference.

In nursing schools we are taught how to master our skills and memorize the theories. But far beyond this tangible things we have learned from our great mentors and life experiences during our clinical rotations to various hospitals that instead of finding for the setbacks, flaws and short comings, we should realize that as nurses we are privileged to touch every person’s life and help preserve the greatest gift of God which is life.

***the article cited above was from the PDI entitled, Dark Stories Born in Delivery Rooms published in May 30, 2005***

Freaky Nurse

Have you ever had a friend, who was your friend not becasue you really jive together, but because you had no choice? Like you work and study in the same places and at the same shifts?

Well, i'll tell you about this friend of mine.
One night during our boring night shifts (there were only 5 patients in the hospital, all are stable and sleeping), this friend of mine left his bag lying open in one of the tables in the Nurse's Station. My gay friend, in the act of putting his bag to another table, accidentally saw a medical certificate and a box of Dapsone on my friend's bag. The medical certificate says that he has Leprosy, a mild form of Leprosy.

Boy, when he told me and a couple of friends about this, we were all speechless. You see, contrary to popular belief, leprosy is not highly contagious--yes that's true.. but anyhow, being a mycobacterium as well, it is transmitted via droplet infection.

And what really freaks me out is that he REFUSES to open up to us, so that means that if my gay friend had never accidentally found his supply of dapsone, we would never know about his condition.

You see, it's not about the disease. We don't really care that he has leprosy, because he would always be our friend, and nothing would change with the way we interact with him. Actually, it's about honesty and sense of care for your colleagues. If you know that you have a disease, which is communicable, don't you think that those people around you (CLOSE people around you) have the right to know?

It pisses me off because he would often use our utensils, and would even take a bite off our sandwich or drink from our bottled drinks all the time. Its like he wanted us to acquire the disease too.


Is that what you call a conscientious nurse?
I think not.