u/Catalina-Juan

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I was called into the room by a student, watched the light leaving my patients eyes and felt for a pulse, felt a thready carotid and immediately pushed the code blue button, yelled out for the code cart and was the first on the chest doing CPR once he was pulseless. After a little while doing CPR we got ROSC. I have never had a code blue on my own patient before, have only witnessed two and assisted with one. I’ve had terrible imposter syndrome despite being a nurse for 8 years because I’ve only been in acute care for 2 years now. It was so scary but it felt amazing to get good feedback from the doctor and code team once it was over. I don’t know if the patient will survive, but I am so proud of myself for how quickly I responded to an emergency.

Edit: thank you all so much for the support and kind words!! It really means so much to me to be a part of such a supportive community. I haven’t always felt like I belong in healthcare but the support you guys have shown me here tells me I am where I should be. I’m so grateful 🩷🩷 thank you!!!

As someone who has never regretted going from bedside RN to NP, I feel like I don’t see enough posts from us. I remember being a floor nurse and thinking about pursuing NP…10 years ago. At that time, many of my peers discouraged me, telling me that the market was saturated and with one overtime a week, I could make the same amount as a NP. Several years later, there’s not even a fleeting moment where I wish I stayed at the bedside and not become a NP. I make significantly more than I did as a floor nurse while having massively better work/life balance and much less physical demands. I also feel an immense amount of appreciation from the physicians I work with. Don’t believe the hype, a high-quality NP gets treated like gold by physicians. Every once in a while, patients might want to remind you that you are not a doctor (which you are not… You are a nurse practitioner lol) but if you are somebody who doesn’t operate from an egotistical perspective, you truly won’t care. To be quite honest, the physicians I work with get way more upset about patients insulting me than I ever do.

Edit: Gift and a curse. If you’re a good NP, physicians will often dump a lot (not all) of their caseload on you. I see this as a positive, however. It’s a vote of confidence.

Honestly speaking, my only regret may be that I wish I got ED experience before becoming a NP. Also, if we’re being honest, I still think CRNA is the best job in

medicine but I would still rank NP fairly high.

PS When you become a nurse practitioner, don’t be a dick to the nurses. This is a very strange phenomenon that I experienced often as a floor nurse, and I still see happening as a NP.

Bracing myself for impact for more of these. I know I should be used to refusing antibiotics by now working in urgent/primary care but man is it hard sometimes to have that whole conversation and almost argument about why five days of “sinus congestion” does not need antibiotics and it’s definitely more a viral URI. Had a telemedicine visit where a chiropractor was telling me she has self measured 101 fever today, sinus pain and fever and cough and it’s day five , tested negative for home test Covid, and now she needs a z-pak. Checked her past encounters and someone gave in before to the exact same complaint for less than a week of symptoms. She then said her chest hurts when she breathes and thinks she also has pneumonia but refuses to take a chest xray bc she does them on patients all day and doesn’t want the radiation herself. She did not even sound congested or look ill on video. I stood my ground and said it’s likely viral and also a zpak is not first line and also won’t help. I’m still recovering from that visit for how mad she was at me. She does not understand it is much harder for me to do the right thing and stand my ground for her sake than just furnishing antibiotics at her request and ending the visit in three mins. And we are only in the beginning of Cold/flu season. How are you guys holding up with these visits .