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RealityRN
Posts Tagged ‘Healthy Living’
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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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Handling Stress
How to replenish your energy for work.

Extreme tiredness, negative feelings, weight gain, and marital problems.

One moment, Kayla thought she was depressed and that medication would help. Another moment, she thought her husband was the problem and that she should quit her marriage.

But Kayla wasn’t depressed. She suffered from something that affects many professional caregivers.

In recent years, Mary Jo Barrett, author and social worker from the Center for Contextual Change, in Elmhurst, [...]
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Handling Stress
Avoiding chronic pain at work.

Simply, slow down.

That advice for new nurses comes from Sharon LaCroix, who experiences chronic neck and back pain because of 15 years as a nurse.

Nursing, obviously, is a physical profession. Aches and pains are the norm, after days filled with moving patients, lugging cumbersome equipment, wiggling around in awkward positions to accommodate patients. Even if you’re young, healthy, and physically fit, at the end of [...]
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Interacting With Patients
Staying professional in the midst of suffering.

It was one of those days in the pediatric intensive care unit you’d love to forget.

One child, a 6-month-old girl, was in a vegetative state, both blind and deaf.  Her mother decided it was too painful to have any contact with her and had stopped visiting. The little girl’s father wanted everything done to save her.

One morning, five minutes after Jana, a second year nurse, [...]
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