Reply With QuoteHello Nicole,
What grade are you in? My name is Jeanne. I am a Registered Nurse and I work in a nursing home in central NY. I take care of the elderly who can no longer take care of themselves and I also take care of elderly who need some rehabilitation so they can get back on their feet and go back home. I love what I do. I meet a lot of interesting people, it's really great to be able to make a living at helping others and it can be a lot of fun. The great thing about nursing is that there are always new things to learn about and it's never boring. If you get burned out in one area of nursing, you can always switch to another area and each area of nursing is very different. I guess what I don't like about the job is that while working with the elderly can be a lot of fun, it can also be sad when you lose someone you have grown to care about. We do use math in our job. Sometimes the doctor will order one dose but you don't have that exact dose, so you have to figure out how much you have to give. For example, lets say the doctor ordered Demerol syrup 75 mg by mouth every 4 hours as needed for pain. But,in the medicine room, we only have Demerol syrup 50 mg per ml. We would have to figure out how many ml we have to give. So then we would have to take the 75 mg (which is the dose we want and divide it by 50 mg (which is how many mg we have on hand) and then multiply it by 5 ml(because it is 50 mg per 5 ml) and we would find out that we would give this patient 7.5 ml to give the dose that the doctor ordered. There are other calculations we have to know also, like when you are dealing with IV's. We have to figure out how many drops per minute we have to deliver in order to give the dosage prescribed by the doctor over the amount of hours he wants the medication to be given, so we have to know how to figure IV infusion times. Statistics is also very important if you are going to be a research nurse. Nurses use math a lot and it is very important to be very accurate because we are dealing with people's lives. We have to be good at conversions, and we have to know farenheit and celsius, metric as well as apothecary, household and metric equivalents. We have to be able to figure Body surface areas, We have to be able to figure out safe dosages based on body weight, ratios and percents are also very important. I hope that this was helpful to you and if you need more help, please don't hesitate to ask. Good luck on your project.
Jeanne
