I had no idea what ICU Nurses were. But, I was the lucky one that fell in love with my ICU nurse. She is kind and funny and has saved my life and the life of my mother, helped my family deal with the eventual passing of my mother, and has served others in her personal life as a volunteer for the Australian Para-Olympics, helps quadrapelegic SCUBA divers, and children in Hipotherapy programs using horses as rehabilitation aides.
She is an awesome teacher and she has kept me from being homeless while I was building my business, I owe her my life many times over, plus she has shown me what true family means. And to top it off she is a great cook!
Let me tell you, You want no one else, but an ICU nurse to take care of you when you are in the Hospital. I have witnessed amazing intelligence and selfless acts of courage and bravery from the ICU nurses in my brief 4-year stint as a Unit Secretary in a cardiothoracic transplant unit and in an OB triage unit..
In 2008 I was forced(due to my marketing business freezing along with the rest of the economy) to take a Weekend job as a unit secretary for a cardiothoracic transplant unit, while I still ran my struggling, start-up, marketing agency during the Week.
My business at the time, that was going through spurts of great income( to me at the time, now I realize it was puny) where I would do the work for the client, followed by no clients and almost homelessness again. It would run in cycles. Later I got a mentor to help me learn how to stop that cycle and grow my business.
My Premed and Emergency Room experience solidified my getting that unit secretary job, with medical benefits. It also allowed me to work on my online business during the Weekends of 2008-2011. This was before I discovered the amazing business that you can find on this page, if you are an ICU nurse, burned out and ready to change your career.
At the time, I had high cholesterol, I found out, as my ICU nurse, made me go see a doctor. I hadn’t been to a doctor in probably 20 years, so my she probably saved my life as well. One of many times.
I had been a volunteer for several Emergency Rooms, and I had much the same undergrad study as My ICU nurse, as I was going to be a doctor. But, lousy MCAT scores ruined that career path option. I panicked during the test, so probably best I was not a doctor. Later through being an ICU unit secretary I learned that the Universe had delivered me from a life of hell that doctors face day to day.
My ICU nurse helped me get that interview for the unit secretary job, that I would later lose through fear of Obamacare, by hospital administration.
Back to my story. Because of my medical terminology background, I understood, more than most unit secretaries, and could act like a fly on the wall, and listen in on the rounds the doctors and nurses did. I learned a ton. I am always at my best when learning, I have found throughout my life.
Because my ICU Nurse, filled me in on the things I could do outside my unit secretary job description, to help the nurses, I had an inside understanding of what an ICU nurses life is really like.
I also had basic, human anatomy and physiology and some medical terminology, and knowledge from my experiences in hospitals, but I had no idea the selfless nature of the life of an ICU nurse.
1) I did not know what they had to do to become nurses
2) I had not ever witnessed the stress that nurses undergo in their professional lives as student nurse, as new ICU nurses and as Seasoned CCRN certified( critical care registered nurses) and finally what a burned out ICU nurse’s life looks like and what choices they have in life after they have been used up and thrown away like yesterday’s trash. Sadly this happens to most ICU nurses. People do not respect nurses and it is wrong. It is dreadful, what ICU Nurses have to endure that most of us have no clue what their life is really like.
3) I did not know the stress they have in their personal lives. Many ICU nurses have stressed relationships at home, because most people do not understand that ICU nurses are under such emotional stress, having to be on all the time, that it is hard for them to just be normal in a relationship. In their career, if they are not in charge all the time people die.
You see it is unfair, that the stress of any job wears away the emotional constitution of a person, to a place were the only options they have for sanity, are extreme exercise, drinking oneself into a stupor in Las Vegas every 3 months, or escaping to some hobby that allows an ICU nurse to emotionally escape the job stresses and become a person again.
ICU nurses have a warped sense of humor because they spend most of their life covered in bodily fluids gone sour from every orifice in the human body. Patients punch, kick, bite and spit at ICU nurses all the time. Doctors yell at them, typically first-year residents that think they are God’s gift to medicine. These resident doctors who can very easily kill a patient if they do not listen to the ICU Nurse(I have seen it happen) who typically has by this time, many years experience, in the day in day out, life and death decisions.
You see medical school only gives them book smarts, and although they think of themselves as doctors, some more than others, they are not truly doctors until they complete the required residency in a hospital situation.
Floor nurses are threatened by them, their intelligence level is so high, meaning they learn very quickly, and they are “on” so much, that any human being would undergo post-traumatic stress syndrome if they had to do what ICU nurses do. I saw it repeatedly on that unit, one ICU nurse was even found having overdosed on a patients morphine, trying to cope with the stress.
After about 5 years, ICU nurses start to lose who they are as people. The emotional stress of dealing with all the details of the human body, hospital protocols that are not always best for the patient, being a patient advocate and protecting doctors from harming patients, happens in the day to day life of an ICU nurse. This kind of pressure would destroy the psyche of the strongest of people. And they are very strong people.
Imagine weight lifting all day during your work. That is the physical stress that is placed on an ICU nurses body every day. ICU Nurses are often rewarded mfor years of service to the human race with extreme neck or back pain for the rest of their lives.
Plus, ICU Nurses have difficult family members from Medicare patients, or street gangs, gang-bangers who come back into the patients room to finish the job they started by shooting the patient in the first place, dealing with clueless administrators and CEO’s that could not make a medical decision if their life depended on it, and the spouses or significant others of ICU nurses, typically lazy bums, or extremely successful professionals, if they are lucky, in another field, to deal with after their 12 hour shift. That is the life of an ICU nurse.
They must escape this reality or go nuts. This happens in cycles of 3 months on and one month off to de-gas. I once asked my ICU nurse what she did for fun, when I first started dating her, her answer,”Nothing” Later I found out she liked to SCUBA Dive(great so did I) and do Equestrian sports( a lot of fun) and we manage her apartment building that she gutted and renovated.
After 3 years in a cardiothoracic transplant unit, witnessing all the above and more life and death situations, codes or the only time you will see ICU nurses running down the hall yelling under their breath,”Oh Fuc#,” transplant surgery, post transplant and pre-transplant procedures that include, blood, gore, and poop in a tube, you start to gain an understanding for why ICU nurse get emotionally used up.
I now started to have a little understanding of what the life on my ICU Nurse had been like. That woman is a saint. Her life has been hell, and all she wanted to do, was help people with her amazing brain.
The system, the career, the corrupt, inept, people within it, that they interact with every day, grinds them up emotionally and spits them out when they crack…and they do crack, some more than most. Some just become emotionally void. It is truly sad what this profession does to ICU Nurses.
It starts from their first decision to go to nursing school. I learned from my Love(an ICU Nurse) that it is extremely hard to get into a nursing school to begin with, and that the study regime is very difficult for any person with the desire to become a nurse, but that is to be expected as an ICU nurse must be on top of her knowledge of systems of the human body, drugs and narcotics that interact with these systems, plus be aware of and be able to cope with the stress of patients dying, the unknown. because medicine is and art and a science and it is not exact, as each person is different, yet has the same, physiology, unless it is broken, because patients dying is a big part of an ICU nurse’s career. That is a given. Nurses are fine with that part they are strong individuals that really care about helping people, but in the same token, they learn quickly not to take emotional responsibility for the past life choices of patients. But, they always do to some degree. This stress if
Medicine is and art and a science and it is not exact, as each person is different, yet has the same, physiology, unless it is broken. Patients dying is a big part of an ICU nurse’s career. That is a given. Nurses are fine with that part they are strong individuals that really care about helping people.but in the same token, they learn quickly not to take emotional responsibility for the past life choices of patients. But, they always do to some degree. This stress if
But, in the same token, they learn quickly not to take emotional responsibility for the past life choices of patients. But, they always do to some degree. This stress if not realized festers and bubbles up to the surface in what can be described as coping mechanisms.
Now, life is better, but not really after burn out usually comes a series of attempts to make a career using their expert knowledge of medicine, far greater than most doctors. It usually consists of going back to school for their Masters degree. Some go into the Nurse Practioner or NP route of study, but then soon realize that their new job is to be the doctors “bitch” Really. They do all the work the Attending Doctors do not want to do, and have huge caseloads, that sometimes, most times, make it impossible to give the patient the kind of attention they want to prescribe.
It usually consists of going back to school for their Masters degree. Some go into the Nurse Practioner or NP route of study, but then soon realize that their new job is to be the doctors “bitch” Really. Some go the route of nurse anesthetist, but that can be very boring after the life and death world of the ICU. They do all the work the Attending Doctors do not want to do, and have huge caseloads, that sometimes, most times, make it impossible to give the patient the kind of attention they want to prescribe.
They do all the work the Attending Doctors do not want to do, and have huge caseloads, that sometimes, most times, make it impossible to give the patient the kind of attention they want to prescribe.
My ICU nurse took the Nurse Education route. She is a great nursing student instructor and teaches one day a Week outside of being director of quality for two hospitals. She now monitors the younger nurse and the kind of care they should provide their patients. She has seen it all the good, the bad and the ugly and she is giving back to the profession that treated her so poorly. She is selfless and that is why I love her.
She now monitors the younger nurses and the kind of care they should provide their patients. She has seen it all, the good, the bad and the ugly and she is giving back to the profession that treated her so poorly. She is selfless and that is why I love her so much.
She also tried the insurance route working the phones, making sure patients that have insurance treat their disease seriously, they usually do not. People that feel they are entitled to health care usually do not respect the care they are given. That too, is hard to see day-after-day.
She also tried to use her MSN in other parts of medicine:
1)Another Insurance company
2) being a travel nurse on repatriation flights, in which she had a lot of fun traveling the world.
I too will travel the world with her as I have found the key to success for the burned out ICU nurses.
Get out of the profession while you still have your sanity!
There are other, much easier ways to make a great living and you can stay home to do it from your computer.
( she deserves every ounce of fun in her life she can get for the service she has given to so many patients)
3) traveling the world, with non-life and death patients usually a broken leg or appendage.
But, after you have learned all that medical knowledge, that most do not understand, after you have been responsible for preventing doctors from killing their patients with bad orders, taking orders from wet behind the ears or corrupt executives just does not fly with my ICU nurse, and it shouldn’t
You see one of the most troubling of situations and realities of an ICU nurse’s career is that they are not respected. They get it from all ends, from patients, from family members, from residents, from housekeepers, and material supply people, from unit secretaries(not me I respected and did my darndest to serve the nurse on my unit) and from any number of executives that have no clue what they are doing as it is their first CEO role. I watched that happen twice from the same hospital corporation. The way she was treated both times was just plain wrong. Many times executives and HR people are in a corrupt circle of protecting their inefficient hind ends. But, she being beat up emotionally so many times, has lost her will to fight back.
Plus, they get to deal with doctors yelling at them because they have Napoleon syndrome. An ICU nurses job is well paid after many years, but there is nothing left of the person to enjoy the money, and it really is not that much money to begin with.
Enter, the last job you will ever have, that is if I have anything to say about it. My ICU Nurse has served society for going on 17 years, enough is enough! No one should be put through that kind of a career.
Luckily I have found the one business system that will allow me to walk into whatever, emotionally draining hell-hole she is working at, and tell her that she will never have to work again in this absurd career. I will take care of her for he rest of her life, and well after I am gone. It is not a matter of if will happen but when it will happen and it is happening, that’s it period. I have watched too many doctors and executives not respect her intelligence and not respect her years in the ICU, Transplant, NICU and Burn units.
It is not a matter of if will happen, but when it will happen and it is happening, that’s it period. I have watched too many doctors and executives not respect her intelligence and not respect her years in the ICU, Transplant, NICU and Burn units.
I have watched too many doctors and executives not respect her intelligence and not respect her years in the ICU, Transplant, NICU and Burn units.
I will pick her up in my arms and like a scene in Officer and a Gentleman, I will walk her out of that medical setting and she will be able to ride horses, on the 50+ acre ranch I am buying her. Her days will then be spent, smiling like a little school girl for the rest of her life. She will breed horses(if she wants to) and we will travel the world SCUBA diving and helping others live a lifestyle of freedom from oppression of any kind. I see it in my minds eye and it is happening.
If you are a burned out ICU nurse and you are reading this, know that you can have freedom too, while still making way over what you make now.
You can not have me( LOL, just kidding around like MA a leader in Empower Network) because my heart belongs to my ICU nurse for life.