It is not the “dark side” filled with dark stories or those horrible nurse stories about patient encounters. There will be arguably some of those stories on occasion if nothing more than to make our point. It is not a vampire story although jokes about night nurses being vampiric have been going around since Florence was a nursing student. We will take pains to offer you advice beyond “Dr. Google” who, trust me, is the worst source of information. Hearing a patient say they “looked it up on the internet”, makes us cringe because honestly it is usually wrong. The advice we will offer you is how to be a patient and let us do the diagnosing. This is important even in the consumer driven healthcare world, since it lets us do our job and use our expertise. Googling it give you just enough information to make you “dangerous”.
We will look at evidence to help nursing move beyond that of basically being a hand maiden or as we often say RN stands for refreshments and narcotics. Nursing is your safety net in the hospital. We are the ones that re-read the orders, question things, and advocate for you as a patient.
What blog would be complete without some “chicken soup for the soul” kinda of things. Well this may be a darker or maybe not so pleasant thing, but nurses have odd humor that helps them cope with the sometimes-rough daily drain of nursing. These are not meant to shame the patient and I would doubt you would ever be able to identify the patient from the story, but they can point out situational humor as well as lessons learned.
New nurses can benefit from this blog. You can see how jaded we get as we have nursed. For a few years.
Some personal things, Nurseferatu is a Nurse Practitioner who works night shift as a hospitalist. He has also worked as a staff nurse on nursing units as well as other locations for the 18 years prior to becoming an NP. You have about as much hint to my identity you are getting without knowing me. I am not trying to be elusive, but the less you know about me the less likely you are to identify patients. There are comment capabilities at the bottom of the post, take time to make this a discussion. I do not support a product, although there will be ads on this page to support the costs of upkeep, take some time to visit those in which you are interested. First entry complete.