Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
No, they don’t “run the show”. They are doing what the doctors tell them to do. But they are the ones who will be taking care of you 24/7 - you will only see the doc for ten minutes a day.

It's clear that you or your loved ones have never spent any amount of time in an ICU. Be thankful for that good luck! And try some humility, because you couldn't be more incorrect about who is actually making the minute-by-minute decisions in the ICU.

I spent a week in the ICU in 1996 and again last month. Try again.

May I suggest that if you were indeed critically ill, perhaps you were not in the best position to assess who is actually making the in-the-moment decisions that impact the future course of a critical, complex case? OTOH, If you were just hanging out with a little bit of bacteremia overnight from your UTI gone bad, then sure, I could see how you would conclude that an MD's order for an antibiotic administered by the robot ICU nurse is how it always goes down/

Well, that sums up how "nice" nurses really are!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
No, they don’t “run the show”. They are doing what the doctors tell them to do. But they are the ones who will be taking care of you 24/7 - you will only see the doc for ten minutes a day.

It's clear that you or your loved ones have never spent any amount of time in an ICU. Be thankful for that good luck! And try some humility, because you couldn't be more incorrect about who is actually making the minute-by-minute decisions in the ICU.

I spent a week in the ICU in 1996 and again last month. Try again.

May I suggest that if you were indeed critically ill, perhaps you were not in the best position to assess who is actually making the in-the-moment decisions that impact the future course of a critical, complex case? OTOH, If you were just hanging out with a little bit of bacteremia overnight from your UTI gone bad, then sure, I could see how you would conclude that an MD's order for an antibiotic administered by the robot ICU nurse is how it always goes down/

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This thread is odd to me. Men love nurses. My DH works in Big Law and it seems like everybody is married to a RN or NP. I’m the odd one out as a non-private sector lawyer.

In DC??? I've never met a nurse socially in DC.

I was thinking the same thing up thread. I’m a partner in DC biglaw. First, in 2020, firms are pretty evenly split men and women, maybe 60/40. And while the numbers thin out in partnership ranks, most associates are already married. Point of all that is, something like 40 percent of married attorneys in DC big law are women. And they aren’t married to nurses. So it’s bizarre to say that everyone in biglaw is married to nurses, because you’re omitting an entire gender.

Of the men.... These days probably a third have sahm wives. But it’s a lot more common than twenty years ago for male partners to have a working wife. Twenty years ago, all capital partners, most income partners and a handful of associates had sahm wives. Now it’s probably most cap partners, few income partners and no associates. Of those sahms, its a mix of former professions, but Former lawyer is the most frequent.

Thinking around my firm of the wives of the men, I can think of two lawyers, one speech pathologist, one sahm former teacher, one doctor, a few sahm former lawyers.... And a couple of the old rainmakers have (Second) Trophy wives. the only nurse wife I can remember in my whole career was an older partner (would have been early 60s) back in the 2000s whose wife was a retired big shot nurse. She’d run the program at a top school, if I recall. But that dude is long retired.

But by far, most frequent career or former career of any attorney in big law is lawyer.

Anonymous wrote:This thread is odd to me. Men love nurses. My DH works in Big Law and it seems like everybody is married to a RN or NP. I’m the odd one out as a non-private sector lawyer.

In DC??? I've never met a nurse socially in DC.

This thread is odd to me. Men love nurses. My DH works in Big Law and it seems like everybody is married to a RN or NP. I’m the odd one out as a non-private sector lawyer.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
No, they don’t “run the show”. They are doing what the doctors tell them to do. But they are the ones who will be taking care of you 24/7 - you will only see the doc for ten minutes a day.

It's clear that you or your loved ones have never spent any amount of time in an ICU. Be thankful for that good luck! And try some humility, because you couldn't be more incorrect about who is actually making the minute-by-minute decisions in the ICU.

I spent a week in the ICU in 1996 and again last month. Try again.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
No, they don’t “run the show”. They are doing what the doctors tell them to do. But they are the ones who will be taking care of you 24/7 - you will only see the doc for ten minutes a day.

It's clear that you or your loved ones have never spent any amount of time in an ICU. Be thankful for that good luck! And try some humility, because you couldn't be more incorrect about who is actually making the minute-by-minute decisions in the ICU.

Hint: it's the "trashy" "hot mess" "blue collar" "slutty" ones. That is, if they're not playing cards.

New poster. I don't have anything against nurses, but when I had a loved one in the ICU for weeks, I was shocked by how the nurses didn't know anything. They show up every twelve hours for a shift, they try to skim a chart and catch up, they seem to miss everything, they all contradict each other and the doctors, and they are lucky not to kill more people. Our family doctors told us to stop talking to the nurses entirely because they didn't know what was going on.

Most people don't see all of this because they're not dealing with such a serious case every day and night for six weeks.

I agree with PP. Nurses don't "run the show."At the end pf the day, when things are bad, surgeons run the show. They are the rock stars. Surgeons save lives. And though we only saw the surgeons a couple of times, they were in surgery with my loved one for more than six hours - twice. And other doctors/specialists stopped by every day to help save my loved one's life - and they always knew what was going on. Sure, some were better than others, but all were worlds away from the nurses.

Nothing against nurses, but I left thinking that I would never want my kids to be nurses. Maybe some of them are brilliant, but they are basically just there to provide medication and monitor things enough to report to the specialists/doctors.

Maybe it's different when things aren't life and death.

This assessment is a downer to read as a nurse but I do believe that many patient families believe this (especially in an ICU/CCU context where things change FAST). They don't understand that things DO or DON'T happen based on the nurses assessment, documentation, communicating and reporting skills and relationships with the MDs, and even then, you can practically beg an MD to do the right thing (if s/he is a jerk) but in the end, they make the orders and we can only follow them or choose not to based on risk/contraindication. I have 'taken one for the team' quite a few times when the issue/error came from the MD and the chart (which the clients rarely see) proves it but the family decides to yell at you.

Maybe the system is broken. But when you pop on duty at 6 am or whatever, you need to read and understand the charts. Not just glance at them. You need to be able to communicate the correct facts to the family (especially those like us who would never yell at anyone, no matter what). I was interrogated by one nurse about my loved one's alcohol intake, but he doesn't drink alcohol. Another nurse told us that he would "die" within 48 hours. She seemed darkly thrilled by this. Another nurse told us she couldn't stand to work at her ICU because she had seen so many people like our loved one die - needlessly. It was a lot of drama that we didn't need, and we ended up comforting her, which was crazy. And after my loved one was transferred via helicopter to another hospital, I was told the following morning by an earnest nurse that his condition had not improved and therefore his surgery was cancelled. She cited a list of medical reasons. None were true. And he survived and is fine now.

These are the big things I remember, but mostly I remember a lot of nurses who gossiped at the nurse's station and were pretty unfriendly towards visitors. I am sad to say that I only really liked one nurse the entire time - and I'm the kind of person who knows and likes basically everyone from Starbucks to the supermarket to work and my kids' schools, etc.

I guess at the end of the day, I felt like the nurses felt overburdened, overwhelmed, and under appreciated - and frankly that hey had something to prove - and they took all of this out on the patients and their families. I learned one thing: if you or a loved one ends up at a hospital, please don't leave them. Be there with the, and be their advocate.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
No, they don’t “run the show”. They are doing what the doctors tell them to do. But they are the ones who will be taking care of you 24/7 - you will only see the doc for ten minutes a day.

It's clear that you or your loved ones have never spent any amount of time in an ICU. Be thankful for that good luck! And try some humility, because you couldn't be more incorrect about who is actually making the minute-by-minute decisions in the ICU.

Hint: it's the "trashy" "hot mess" "blue collar" "slutty" ones. That is, if they're not playing cards.

Yes, that's right! The nurses and residents are the first to show up in your room and call for the crash cart.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
No, they don’t “run the show”. They are doing what the doctors tell them to do. But they are the ones who will be taking care of you 24/7 - you will only see the doc for ten minutes a day.

It's clear that you or your loved ones have never spent any amount of time in an ICU. Be thankful for that good luck! And try some humility, because you couldn't be more incorrect about who is actually making the minute-by-minute decisions in the ICU.

Hint: it's the "trashy" "hot mess" "blue collar" "slutty" ones. That is, if they're not playing cards.

New poster. I don't have anything against nurses, but when I had a loved one in the ICU for weeks, I was shocked by how the nurses didn't know anything. They show up every twelve hours for a shift, they try to skim a chart and catch up, they seem to miss everything, they all contradict each other and the doctors, and they are lucky not to kill more people. Our family doctors told us to stop talking to the nurses entirely because they didn't know what was going on.

Most people don't see all of this because they're not dealing with such a serious case every day and night for six weeks.

I agree with PP. Nurses don't "run the show."At the end pf the day, when things are bad, surgeons run the show. They are the rock stars. Surgeons save lives. And though we only saw the surgeons a couple of times, they were in surgery with my loved one for more than six hours - twice. And other doctors/specialists stopped by every day to help save my loved one's life - and they always knew what was going on. Sure, some were better than others, but all were worlds away from the nurses.

Nothing against nurses, but I left thinking that I would never want my kids to be nurses. Maybe some of them are brilliant, but they are basically just there to provide medication and monitor things enough to report to the specialists/doctors.

Maybe it's different when things aren't life and death.

This assessment is a downer to read as a nurse but I do believe that many patient families believe this (especially in an ICU/CCU context where things change FAST). They don't understand that things DO or DON'T happen based on the nurses assessment, documentation, communicating and reporting skills and relationships with the MDs, and even then, you can practically beg an MD to do the right thing (if s/he is a jerk) but in the end, they make the orders and we can only follow them or choose not to based on risk/contraindication. I have 'taken one for the team' quite a few times when the issue/error came from the MD and the chart (which the clients rarely see) proves it but the family decides to yell at you.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
No, they don’t “run the show”. They are doing what the doctors tell them to do. But they are the ones who will be taking care of you 24/7 - you will only see the doc for ten minutes a day.

It's clear that you or your loved ones have never spent any amount of time in an ICU. Be thankful for that good luck! And try some humility, because you couldn't be more incorrect about who is actually making the minute-by-minute decisions in the ICU.

Hint: it's the "trashy" "hot mess" "blue collar" "slutty" ones. That is, if they're not playing cards.

New poster. I don't have anything against nurses, but when I had a loved one in the ICU for weeks, I was shocked by how the nurses didn't know anything. They show up every twelve hours for a shift, they try to skim a chart and catch up, they seem to miss everything, they all contradict each other and the doctors, and they are lucky not to kill more people. Our family doctors told us to stop talking to the nurses entirely because they didn't know what was going on.

Most people don't see all of this because they're not dealing with such a serious case every day and night for six weeks.

I agree with PP. Nurses don't "run the show."At the end pf the day, when things are bad, surgeons run the show. They are the rock stars. Surgeons save lives. And though we only saw the surgeons a couple of times, they were in surgery with my loved one for more than six hours - twice. And other doctors/specialists stopped by every day to help save my loved one's life - and they always knew what was going on. Sure, some were better than others, but all were worlds away from the nurses.

Nothing against nurses, but I left thinking that I would never want my kids to be nurses. Maybe some of them are brilliant, but they are basically just there to provide medication and monitor things enough to report to the specialists/doctors.

Maybe it's different when things aren't life and death.

^opps wrong thread!

I have a female physician family member. She is in a male dominated specialty with terrible hrs. Her DH is not in the medical field and she never clicked with male doctors. To similar I think.

He sort of reminds of a Danny Tanner. He has a good job with typical hrs and doesn’t intend to be a SAHD, but he takes care of a lot of the cooking, does all the decorating, the home organizing, and much of the cleaning. They seem to compliment each other and I’m really happy she found someone that does considering these other replies.

Anonymous wrote:
No, they don’t “run the show”. They are doing what the doctors tell them to do. But they are the ones who will be taking care of you 24/7 - you will only see the doc for ten minutes a day.

It's clear that you or your loved ones have never spent any amount of time in an ICU. Be thankful for that good luck! And try some humility, because you couldn't be more incorrect about who is actually making the minute-by-minute decisions in the ICU.

Hint: it's the "trashy" "hot mess" "blue collar" "slutty" ones. That is, if they're not playing cards.

Anonymous wrote:This thread is vile. The elitism is disgusting. I have huge respect and admiration for nurses. Ask anyone who has been in the ICU or hospital — nurses run the show. I’ve worked with many nurses, and not one of them has been “trashy” or uneducated.

I can’t believe that I actually read that only a NP who went to Georgetown would be dateable, or some bullcr*p like that. This thread is the worst of DCUM.

Yeah this thread really is awful. I find it very disturbing that there are people out there who really think this way. I'm an RN with a BSN from U. of Maryland and I wouldn't describe any of my former classmates as trashy or uneducated. Of course, like all professions you have nurses who are more professional and intelligent than others but the same can be said for pretty much any field.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In DC? No.

Blue collar job with terrible hours.

Statistically it's backed up. Lawyers marry lawyers, doctors marry doctors, etc. There are probably some people that marry nurses, but not maybe very well educated or high-earning.

Blue collar? elaborate.

Lots of harpies on here. 2nd career BSN. Left my boring nonprofit management job. As a Mom lots more flexibility, stressed but never bored in nursing. I admire most of the fellow nurses I know. They show up and they get things done.