The time has come! I've passed boards, obtained my state license and I am scheduled to have ''temporary privileges'' at my facility next week! This is such an exciting time for my family and me! We've worked so hard for so many years and this is it. The really amusing thing? I opened the mail a couple of weeks ago when my license came through ...

If I could give any future medical student advice about the ER, my three most important words would be: Vicks Vapor Rub. When I first entered the ER, I was prepared to be jaded, but I was not prepared for the smells: abscesses, STDs, rotten teeth, body odor, mildewed t-shirts, alcoholics, chain smokers, drug-addicts, and diarrhea diapers, to ...

I am sitting in a building erected in a decade when buildings were square and walls could never be thick enough. Brown ivy climbs a brick exterior white-washed so many times that it seems smooth. The old steel radiators chitter like a multitude of sparrows and my seat was built for someone with a smaller number of dietary choices. The nurse who ...

Last week, NP & PA Student blogger Terry Clarke shared his concerns over the status of nursing. ''I am currently in a class called ‘Societal Forces' as a precursor to my first semester of advanced assessment in the Adult/Gero Primary Care Nurse Practitioner track. The teachers are passionate and well informed. The speakers are excellent, but ...

During my first rotation in family medicine, we had a patient present to the clinic with a random collection of symptoms that seemed to come and go with no particular pattern. She had been experiencing sweating, dizziness, nausea and shock-like sensations around her chest. A work-up was done for a pheochromocytoma but all the labs came back ...

''Suicide is so frowned upon in this society, but honestly, life isn't for everybody.  It's sad when kids kill themselves 'cause they didn't really give it a chance, but life is like a movie: if you've sat through more than half of it and it sucked every second so far, it probably isn't gonna get great right at the very end for you and ...

There have been times in my nursing career when I have put the pieces of a clinical picture together only to see something entirely different than the treating physician. The picture I would see was not based only on the lab work, or clinical manifestations of an illness, but was guided by the narrative of the ...

Have you visited our blogs lately? Last week, new NPs and nurse veterans battled on the value of floor experience. Our NP & PA Student blogger Terry Clarke, currently enrolled in a fast track NP program, expressed his views on what experienced nurses have going for them and what they still have to learn. Here are a few of the comments your ...

As I entered the patient's room, I introduced myself and asked if her name was ''Sarah.'' She said ''yes,'' nodding in my direction with a welcoming smile. Prior to entering the patient's room, I had diligently reviewed the chart. She was 93 and had been hospitalized after slipping and falling in her home, where she lived alone. Her husband had ...

When a friend calls to me from the road　And slows his horse to a meaning walk,　I don't stand still and look around　On all the hills I haven't hoed,　And shout from where I am, What is it?　No, not as there is a time to talk.　I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,　Blade-end up and five feet tall,　And plod: I go up to the stone wall　For a friendly ...