I Dare You to Drink the Vinegar

What do nurses do? I think this is a question that anyone going into nursing school needs to resarch before they accept their seat in a nursing program. I have to admit (I am fairly certain I have admitted this before) that I registered for the Bachelor of Nursing program in 2006 because I was kind of lost. I just returned to my parents house after a failed attempt at living in Vancouver. When I started the program I was not even sure I would ever practice. I did not feel like nursing was for me until close to completing my medical/surgical rotation in my second semester. This is when I started to understand that being a Registered Nurse was about more than simply completing list list of medical-type tasks. I do not think I fully appreciated the profession of nursing until I started graduate school. I do not think I fully understood the role of a mental health nurse until I started working as a mental health educator when I lived in Calgary in 2013 and this was probably mostly the resu

I think I forgot that I wrote this blog again, until a nursing professor from a university in the US emailed me to ask permission to use an entry as a recommended reading for a class they teach. Blogs are such an interesting thing for me. I love writing and for some reason I think that I will have a excess of free time to write. I have written many since I was 16 and discovered them in the vast expanse of the Internet. I have a few on the go right now that I most use as a means of reflecting on my nursing practice and also reflecting on being a parent. I do not think I ever expect anyone will actually read my ranting and sometimes academic thoughts so it was a pleasant surprise and welcome reminder that someone in the world may be reading this and that it may be helping fellow nurses in some way. Yesterday I had a conversation with a student about what the appropriate intervention is when a patient that is being discharged openly tells the nurse that they will be going directly from