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RealityRN
Posts Tagged ‘Energy’
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Managing Your Career

You may just be embarking on your nursing career but have your sights set on travel nursing. You'll be able to see the world, get great benefits, and hone your problem solving and clinical skills.

But there's a catch: you'll need two years experience first. Here Jeff Long,  marketing manager of Medical Solutions, a staffing company that places nurses in travel nursing jobs, talks about what [...]
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Rookie Wit & Wisdom

I am a nurse on a cardiovascular floor. I have been there for a couple of years and can't help but notice the increasing acuity of the patients.

Our nurse/patient ratio is 1:5/6. I know that doesn't sound like a lot to some people, but most of the patients we take care of have a list 20 miles long of medical conditions, which only adds to [...]
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Rookie Wit & Wisdom

I am drained: mentally, physically, emotionally, and psychologically.

One month at the PICU, I’m so tired. It's been the kind of month that keeps you up all night. If you finally get to sleep, you wake up from a disturbing dream.

You smile and joke the whole day at work, but subconsciously you're bleeding from the gut. And there are no sutures to keep the wound closed. [...]
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Reality Unscripted

My husband got back a couple weeks ago from a 5-day fly fishing adventure in Montana. For him, this is as close to heaven as this earth offers. Standing in a cold mountain stream. Watching the snow falling. Catching Brook Trout (I have no idea what he actually catches, but that's the only fish name I could think of). Letting [...]
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Reality Unscripted

One of my early posts was about setting boundaries with those who are all too happy to cross them. This go around I'm taking a different slant.

I'm here to admit I haven't done a very good job at setting my own boundaries.

I'm in the middle of a situation that has made me exhausted, crabby, and out of clean underwear. I've allowed myself to [...]
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Handling Stress
A new nurse self-care survey can help you identify your blind-spots.

“Take care of yourself!” - Wouldn’t it be nice if your job description included this directive?

Unfortunately, nurses, who pour themselves into caring for others, are notorious for self-neglect. There’s no one around to make sure you make “you” a priority.

It’s a conundrum—you know you ought to take better care of yourself, but you don’t. Maybe you’re too tired to care. Maybe you don’t know [...]
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Handling Stress
How real nurses find energy for work and home.

Laura’s plate of cookies sits at the nurses' station after the unit potluck. You walk by and take one. It’s just a harmless cookie. When you pass by again, you take another. Pass again: another cookie. By the end of your shift, you’re not sure how many cookies—and calories—you have consumed.

Gretchen Vanderbosch, a dietician for Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital in Barrington, IL, calls this cookie [...]
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Handling Stress
How nurses can stay positive and focused in high stress environments.

Tony Schwartz, founder and president of The Energy Project (theenergyproject.com), an organization currently launching a project to improve the nursing work environment, and co-author of The Power of Full Engagement, says that nurses are by nature better at caring about others than they are at caring for themselves.

Isn’t it time to start caring about your own health? In this exclusive RealityRN interview, Schwartz discusses how [...]
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Reality Unscripted

I’m not sure you can make nights fit with the rest of your life.

“I love the idea of working nights—the pace is great,” writes a recent grad. “But it’s wreaking havoc on my personal life. Working three 12-hour nights and then having four days off sounds great. In reality, I’m always exhausted. How do I make nights fit in with the rest of [...]
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Handling Stress
Advice for the nurse on nights.

Nights: You either loathe them or love them. But as a new nurse you usually don’t get to choose your ideal shift. Nights are often all that’s available. And either you adjust, or you don’t.

Melissa Granger, an oncology nurse at Elmhurst Memorial Hospital in Elmhurst, Illinois, was “on the brink of depression” because she couldn’t handle nights when she first graduated.

But Christy James, a labor [...]
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