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I'm a registered nurse, and I've been working in the field for 29 years.

I work in the recovery room of the hospital. In short, it's our job to take care of patients after surgery until they're ready to go to the floor, which is where they have their rooms.

Well, last time I was in, I was in charge. We go on a rotating basis, and 3 or 4 times a month you are the nurse in charge. It's your job then to oversee the whole unit, handle problems, and do scheduling. If extra help is needed or we're short on nurses, it would be the charge nurses' job to contact an on-call nurse to come in and help. You have to try and find someone who can come in to cover. When you're in charge, you also have to direct where the patients are going so that the patients are divided evenly between the nurses. We also have to process orders, page doctors, do some clerical work, talk to bed placement people and speak with families wondering how their relatives are doing, etc. It's busy.

Well, first we get them hooked up to the monitors and machines that read their vital signs, respiration, pulse, etc. If their vital signs aren't within normal limits, then you have to respond appropriately to correct the problem. In particular, you have to manage whatever pain they may have by giving them the correct painkillers.

We have to ask the patients to give us a number reflecting how much pain they are in from 0 to 10, 0 being no pain and 10 being "the worst possible pain you could ever possible imagine".

All the time. I always reiterate that 10 is the worst possible pain that you could ever be in, but people who are coming off of very minor and simple surgeries who should not be in much pain still always say that their pain is a 10. It's annoying.

I wanted to help people, and there aren't many professions where you can help someone more directly than in the medical field. But I also wanted to enter for other reasons. First, there is always a need for nurses, and so you can always find a job. It's flexible; you can work a lot of different hours and at a lot of different places.

Well, where I work it's a wide variety of patients. You could see everything from infants to children, adults to the elderly. You could have every different kind of specialty; general surgery, orthopedics, ear/nose/throat, neurological, and all the intensive care patients as well. Sometimes you think you've seen everything, but you're always wrong.

Evergreen Park Community High School.

I always wanted to do something medical, but I didn't always want to be a registered nurse. I wanted to be a medical technologist. A medical technologist is basically a lab worker who runs lab tests, draws blood, stuff like that.

Carthage College, they had the program I was looking for. I also liked the school and the size of the school. It turns out, though, that I didn't like my medical tech major.

In my first class; it didn't take long. It was an introduction to the clinical laboratory, and I didn't like it at all. It was way too technical, lots of test tubes, like being in chemistry lab. It was all about adding a drop of this and a drop of that. At that point I decided that I wanted more of a human element in my work, and I decided on nursing instead.

First, I spent two years at Carthage, taking all of the classes I could take there that would count for something in nursing school. After those two years, I transferred to Evangelical School of Nursing in Oak Lawn. I was then in nursing school for two years. It was called a "diploma" program, and they don't really do them any more. These days, you either get an associate's degree, or a Bachelor's of Science in Nursing, which is 4 years. My degree fell somewhere in between, which meant that I didn't have a bachelor's degree in nursing, but that I had to take fewer classes when I went back later to get my bachelor's.

Yes, I do. That would have been the smart thing to do, because if you don't get it, you'll just have to go back for it later. If I had known at the time, I would have stayed in school an extra year to get my Bachelor's of Science in Nursing. As it was, I ended up going back for my Bachelor's shortly after graduating from the "diploma" program at my nursing school.

On my current hospital's surgical floor. I haven't been here for the whole 29 years, but I have been working in the recovery room exclusively since 1994. So, for the last 14 years or so, I've been in the this Recovery Unit. In between, I worked at another hospital and at two different infertility clinics.

Yeah, actually, after working a year on the floor. It's more intense than working on the floor because you look after more critical cases. By the time those patients get to the floor, they're more stabilized. You get more patients that need more immediate attention. What I liked about it was that it was more fast-paced; you only have the patients for a short time. People are constantly in and out, it's short and sweet. Also, the wide variety of things that we get in recovery keeps things interesting. Generally, also it's a Monday through Friday job. You don't have to work every other weekend and every other holiday, like some positions.

Well, we come in wearing street clothes and we change into our scrubs. We enter the recovery room and get to work. We try to have only two patients at a time, but that doesn't work.

About twenty.

Oh geez, all the time. We try to have two, but that's not realistic.

Well, for example, we had a young student who had just had his appendix removed, so he was recovering from the anesthesia. So a patient like him comes in, and if they're not awake, you put on oxygen, blood pressure cuffs to measure it, and check vital signs. If they're not awake, you try to rouse them. You tap them, call their name, tell them surgery is over and try to wake them up. If they are resting peacefully and breathing well, though, then you can just let them sleep. Sometimes people aren't ready to wake up just yet and they can have a bad reaction to waking up too early.

Well, if they're not breathing well, you have to stimulate them, because waking up forces them to breathe better. After that, you usually put on warm blankets because they feel cold. After being in the operating room, which is pretty cold, their body temperatures have often fallen. They also shiver as part of the anesthesia wearing off. I then assess their pain level and medicate as necessary.

Sometimes if the anesthesiologist hasn't reversed the anesthesia enough, you might have to call them and have them reverse it more to bring the patient out of it.

Minimum stay is at least a half hour, and we check vitals every fifteen minutes. Generally, though, people stay closer to an hour. There isn't any maximum stay time, but in order for a patient to go they have to have stable vital signs, be awake and oriented, and their pain has to be what they consider tolerable. We have to check the orders on the chart, and if there is anything that the doctor has ordered like medications, x-rays, blood work, etc. we have to get that process started.

Well, you immediately notify the anesthesiologist, and they give the primary orders in the recovery room. You also notify the medical residents. You monitor blood pressure and vital signs more frequently and give more fluids.

Not often. Usually we can avert anything like that because we're checking the patients constantly. We don't have many patients "code" as they say on doctor shows. But there are always exceptions. People have died in the recovery room, yes.

These days it's probably about $20 an hour for a new grad. Generally, in the hospital, it's hourly. Some of the administration might be salaried, but it's mostly hourly. Doctor's offices, surgical centers, and primary care facilities are also likely to pay less, big hospitals paying the most.

Probably at least $50,000 a year or so. It's not bad for a fresh grad.

Probably someone working for an agency. An agency is an outside nursing company that sends nurses to different hospitals. You don't work for a particular hospital. If you work intensive care or night shifts, those are also ways to make more.

When I began, I was a Registered Nurse level 1. It goes to level 4. A new grad would be a level 1. A level 2 would have completed certain degrees of experience and dealt with different things at the hospital. For level 3, I had to have my Bachelor's of Science in Nursing and complete a big paper. A level 4 is like a Master's degree equivalency or a certification in a specialty.

It's in everything. The higher you go, the more is expected of you. You're expected to do more and take more leadership roles. You may be expected to train newer workers and volunteer for classes. I recently did training for being a CPR instructor. I'm currently Registered Nurse Level 3 making $40 an hour at normal time and time and a half, or $60 for overtime.

Probably around $45,000, but it would be more if I were working full time or weekends.

Well, you look at all situations from a medical background, I guess. You're more sensitive towards sick or injured people. I luckily have never had to do CPR on anybody in the grocery store, but you would be legally certified to do so. It's part good and part bad - people expect you to be able to help them if they're sick. They come to you with one symptom and ask you to diagnose them, or people expect you to be able to help at a sporting event when somebody trips and hurts himself. There are just a lot of times when there's not much you can do more than any bystander.

We have to keep up on the latest changes to CPR and medical protocols. You wouldn't believe how often the procedures of simple processes like CPR or the Heimlich maneuver are changed as new studies are released. We're required to take advanced cardiac life support and pediatric life support classes. There are also periodic in-service trainings that we undergo.

One of the biggest plusses is that there is always a job. There's a high demand for nurses, and you can always find a job. You can work a variety of shifts—day shifts, p.m. shifts, nights. You can basically work as little as you want or as much as you want. It's also a plus that you don't have to work every other weekend or holiday, just the occasional night that you're on-call.

It's a physically demanding job and you're on your feet all day. You can be lifting and pushing things all day. There is always a risk of being exposed to all sorts of diseases unknowingly. The patient is generally always right, so you always have to be accommodating, even when you know you're correct, just like in customer service. The biggest problem is probably that nursing units are generally short-staffed and it's not always possible to give the best care. It's impossible to please everyone because each nurse only has two hands. Hospitals never close.

Well, there are strict standards of care that you stick to, which are designed to protect you in case things do go wrong. If you deviate from the standards of care and the patient is somehow hurt, then you could be legally responsible. If you give them the wrong dose of a medication or neglect a patient, you would be liable.

The demand will exceed the supply. There don't seem to be many people going into nursing. It's a hard job. You're in critical situations and people's lives are in your hands. It can be nerve-wrecking.

No, not really. We had one in nursing school, which was a really rare thing in those days. There are probably one or two in surgery at the hospital I work at now. There still aren't many. Perhaps as the demand for nurses continues to increase, we'll see more male nurses.

Well, the biggest change for me was probably the integration of computers into our jobs. When we started there were no computers, and now everything is in the computer system. That was a hard transition for me. I am comfortable with the computers now, but I will probably never master the system. This is probably something that would be easier on the newer nurses, as they have grown up using computers.

The basic nursing duties stay the same but with additions, especially the use of new equipment. We have things today that we never had when I started out, and you have to learn quickly how to use the new equipment. When I started, we didn't even have EKGs to put on all patients, and we had to manually check their vital signs. Technologically, we have come a long way.

Well, if you're going to go into nursing, you should definitely go into the Bachelor's of Science in Nursing. Don't do what I did. Your emphasis would be on math and science, obviously. A trend in a lot of nurses now, though, would be to get a Master's degree and become a Nurse Practitioner, which means that they are given more responsibility and work under the supervision of a doctor. They're like a mini-doctor, really.

They should volunteer in a hospital and get a feel for dealing with patients and what the feeling of a hospital is like.

They would probably be doing clerical work, answering phones, shadowing nurses, that sort of thing. Through a high school you can set up that sort of shadowing program.

Flexibility, patience, and organization. You have to be really patient in dealing with both patients and your superiors. You have to be calm; you can't get nervous and freeze up.

Someone who can't handle pressure situations, someone who isn't organized. You have to be able to know where everything is, so organization is very important.

Probably that there's never going to be enough help, that you're always going to be short-staffed.

Well, it is a good field. I think it's a good profession for if you're going to have a family, because I was able to keep working when I had children; I just cut down my hours. You make decent money. I've never felt like it was pointless to get a babysitter because I wasn't making enough to make it worthwhile. If you need more money, you can always increase your hours, or get a second job. There are so many places you can work - different hospitals, clinics, or private nursing for an individual. You could work at a doctor's office, or be a school nurse, or be a corporate nurse. Some nurses even work as sales reps for pharmaceutical companies. It's a wide-open field. The key is to find a place that works in your life.