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The search phrase that most often leads people to my blog is “benefits of being a nurse.” I once wrote a post with a similar title , but it was just about a particular situation with my doctor. It didn’t actually spell out what I think are the benefits to being a nurse. It may just be time for that post. After 11 years, I feel as though I have some idea what I’ve gotten myself into and what I like about it. So here are what I consider to be the top 5 benefits to being a nurse…
5) Location, location, location
All 50 states in the United States make it very easy to get a license. Once you have your initial license in whatever state you originally take your state boards in, you can seek reciprocity in any other state. Say you live in Washington state and want to move to Oregon. All you have to do is check with the board of nursing in Oregon and fill out an application for reciprocity. You will also have to send them some other forms, sometimes school transcripts, and some states wish you to be fingerprinted at the time of application, as well. Just send the fees that the state requires along with all of the required application forms and the state BON where you wish to relocate will verify all of the information and verify that you currently don’t have any disciplinary action against your license. When everything is in order, they send you a new license for that state. As a nurse, it’s easy to relocate from state to state and find employment.
4) Flexible schedule
In virtually any hospital in the country there are a large variety of shifts and number of hours per pay period for a nurse to work. 8 hour shifts, 10 hour shifts, 12 hours shifts. Days, evenings, nights. And those could be anywhere from 20 to 80 hours per pay period (a 2 week pay period). Or a clinic or school nursing works for those who want a more traditional schedule. There are just a lot of choices available to find the schedule that fits you best.
3) Variety
In nursing there are so many settings to work in. A hospital, a clinic, a school. And within those there are a lot of specialties to choose from. Pediatrics, oncology, urology, neurology, and on and on. There are a large variety of choices available to find the area you enjoy the most. And then there are nursing positions to choose from. Staff nurse, floor charge nurse, floor unit manager, educator, hospital wide nursing supervisor, research nurse, and on and on. It’s all about choices and options.
2) Challenge
I get bored easily. It’s a fact. And that’s one reason nursing is such a good fit for me. There is never a dull moment, no matter what area you work in. No day is ever quite the same. Each day and each area and each nursing position has it’s own set of challenges. And as you move from area to area, there are new skill sets and new information to learn. Nursing is a profession that will continue to always provide a challenge.
1) Something to be proud of
I don’t mean this to demean any other profession or occupation, but nursing is a career you can take pride in. It’s an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of others. I consider myself lucky to feel that way. I consider myself lucky to be a nurse. I had an instructor in college tell the class “Being a nurse isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. And years later, I know she was right.
You might notice I didn’t mention money/wages as a benefit to being a nurse. That’s not to say the pay is bad. I’ve always been able to support myself on what I earn just fine, even though I may never be wealthy by some people’s standards. I just didn’t mention the pay because nursing is so much more than a paycheck to me, and there are so many more valuable benefits.
This afternoon I was at my hairdresser’s salon getting a haircut. We were discussing whether it’s time to highlight my hair again. I was naturally a blond as a child, but my hair’s gotten darker as I’ve gotten older. (Well, except for the part that’s turning grey…) I made the comment that “I’m a blond at heart.” She smiled and laughed and said “You do have a blond giggle.” I’m not exactly sure what that was supposed to mean… or whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I have no idea why I was thinking about my very first job recently, but I was. It was a kind of unusual job. I peeled chittem and dried and it and sold it to the local feed store. You’re probably thinking to yourself, “huh?”. So let me explain. Chittem is the bark of the cascara buckthorn tree and it’s used in making some laxatives. I was around 11 or 12 years old and would go to work with my dad (he was a logger, a timber faller) and ride his ATV through the woods peeling the bark off of these trees and carrying it on the back of the ATV in burlap sacks. Then when we got the bark home I would lay it out on the shingles on the roof of the house and let it dry for a day or two and then put it back in the burlap sacks and take it to the local feed store to sell it. I can’t remember how much they paid me for it. Thirty five cents a pound, I think it was. Something like that. But I do remember that by the end of that summer I had the grand sum of FIFTY dollars in my savings account. I just quickly did the math and that adds up to just under one hundred and forty three pounds of dried bark! That’s a whole lot of bark. And it would have been more except for the fact I spent almost an entire day peeling the bark of lovely maple trees… the wrong kind of tree. In my defense I was young and the two types of trees do look similar. So, now, what was your first job?
I just read an article that made me wonder just how some people can do things in such poor taste. I swear some people don’t have a single bit of thought to how their actions or words may come across to others. Or maybe they do, and they do the things they do for shock value. Anyway, Mary Kay Letourneau is hosting a “Hot Teacher Night” at a Seattle area bar this weekend. She’ll be hosting, her husband will be the deejay. For those of you not familiar with the names, Mary Kay was a teacher who went to prison for about 7 and a half years when she had a highly inappropriate with a student of hers. It was a physical relationship when the student was 12 years old and she was 34. The two have two children together and married a year after she was released from prison. Is it just me, or does this hosting this Hot Teacher Night seem as though they’re making light of the situation, maybe exploiting it for attention? And I find that highly inappropriate and distasteful. I’m by no means prudish or uptight, but flaunting the situation like that just crosses a line, I think. And your thoughts?
About a week ago at work one night a patient spit water on me. Well, actually they spit a mouthful of water they had just swished around their mouth at me. Gross! Ew. Yuck. To answer your questions before you ask, yes, they were confused and no, I have no idea why the did this. Later that night a few coworkers and I started talking about the things we have happen to us at work that are gross. We get spit on, peed on, puked on, pooped on. And that can all happen in just one shift. But we decided it’s more gross to touch a stranger’s feet all day long. Seriously. The subject of my upcoming pedicure (the one I had on Sunday) had come up and at least three of us agreed we’d rather deal with the gross stuff we do every day than give a stranger a pedicure. Touching icky strange feet all day? No thank you! And the same goes for being a dental hygienist. Stick my hands in stranger’s mouths all day? No thanks! Ewww. I guess each of us has a different level of what kinds of gross things we can handle. Handle both literally and figuratively, of course.
So yesterday I had a perfect lovely, lazy Sunday. I got my first ever pedicure and loved it! (Well, except for the times it tickled when she touched my feet. My feet are really ticklish.) Then I did some shopping not for anything in particular but just for whatever caught my eye. And then I did some grocery shopping … the only really constructive part of the day at all. At the end of the day I came home and made a delicious green pepper steak over rice for dinner and watched some tv and read … A perfect ending to a lovely, sunny day. I felt the need to make up for all that laziness today, though. So I cleaned house, hung up a few mirrors, did some dishes and laundry, and swept off the patio. Just the usual domestic goddess type stuff. Boy, I do love my boring and drama free life!
Last night I was driving along a residential street in the dark. I came to a four way intersection and stopped. It was clear, so I started to cross the intersection. When I was about halfway across a boy maybe around 13 or so on a skateboard tripped on the sidewalk on the far side of the intersection and slid off the sidewalk into the edge of the street. He was only off the sidewalk a few inches and I stopped immediately and waited for him to get up and back on the sidewalk before I proceeded through the intersection. As I went past him I noticed he was flipping me off. I’d never gotten any closer than halfway across the intersection from him when he was off the sidewalk, so I’m not really sure why he felt the need for the rude hand gesture.
On the other hand, though, I was reminded of someones act of kindness towards me today. There’s a country song I heard on the radio that had some lines in that reminded me of this. The lines are “Treating your neighbor like he’s your next of kin wouldn’t be gone with the wind if the world had a front porch like we did back then.” My dad has lived in the same house for 37 years now. For many of those years the same couple lived in the house right next door. We became very friendly with them. The wife, her name was Frankie, would always call me over to her house to give me homemade sweet pickles whenever she canned some. She knew how much I liked them. She did this for no other reason than to bring me pleasure. It was truly just an act of kindness. One that thirty some years later I still remember.
