It has been almost two years now since I graduated school and became a respiratory therapist. Which means it has been almost two years since I have studied something with the goal of testing towards an advancement in my education/career/life. It seems like a disproportionately large amount of my life thus far has been spent in an effort to obtain ...

My wife and I are going to have a baby in late August. My plan is to take a few weeks of PTO and stay home with the kiddo once my wife goes back to work. I figure by that time I should have more than enough PTO in the bank to take a nice little baby vacation with some PTO to spare ... unless things stay slow... We have officially entered that ...

I was rounding with a doc one time when he was breaking the news to a 96-year-old patient that she had heart failure. ''No,'' the patient informed the doc, ''I refuse to have heart failure...'' I recently found out that I have type II diabetes. My vision had gotten increasingly near-sighted over a two-week span and I could not drink enough ...

As I sit here relaxing on a Friday night, a full weekend of work looming ahead of me, trying to collect my thoughts while not thinking too hard about how I am not really going to have a weekend to end this week, I am struck by a memory from my days as a student (which seem very far in the past, and not so long ago all at the same time)... I ...

I would say I am a pretty easy-going guy who gets along with pretty much everyone I work with, but it is nearly impossible to like everyone on a personal level all the time. As a medical professional I sometimes find myself working side by side on a patient with someone that, outside of work, I couldn't stand to be within three feet of. It can be ...

''I'm pretty sure I'll be off early tonight,'' I said to my wife, ''not a whole lot on the floor ... should be home by six.'' In fact, I didn't get home until two in the morning ... one code and one stat C-section after uttering those 20 words sealed my fate. My wife, being the nurse that she is (and nurses being the superstitious bunch that they ...

For the newly graduated ex-respiratory student ''free time'' is a bit of a new concept. I don't know about you, but I know I feel guilty every time I find myself sitting in the living room watching TV. I look on the calendar, check my phone's agenda, ''Nope, there is nothing I am supposed to be doing today.'' It just feels wrong! Every day that I ...

In honor of Respiratory Care Week, I want to take some time and give thought to what being a respiratory therapist means to me. As I mentioned in the very first blog I ever wrote for ADVANCE, before I went to Respiratory school I was a guy with an English Degree, working at a factory making custom roll film in the pitch black dark every ...

As my first RC week as an RRT approaches, I sit and wonder what it is all about. For Nurses Week the hospital staff does everything they can to swoon over the nurses: They give them gifts, they order lunch out for the week, and there are raffles and balloons. But, then Respiratory Care Week comes and there is maybe a day of pizza lunch and a ...

Technically I was three minutes late ... I clocked in at 0803, but our time clock rounds to the nearest 15 minutes, so as far as the clock and my paycheck were concerned I was right on time. Don't think it was a big deal, I am usually 10 minutes early ... And I will have to be forgiven, because I was up until 0100 the night before (or was it ...