The best thing you can do for yourself is managing your cholesterol level, BP, and blood sugar at this point, with the cholesterol management being the MOST important (along with quitting smoking if you do smoke). You can't fully get rid of plaque in arteries once it's there, but you can reduce the amount of fluid fat in those plaques, shrinking them down and allowing better flow.

If you haven't already, ask your doctor for a lipid panel to be drawn. You want your HDL ("good" cholesterol) above 60, and your LDL ("bad" cholesterol) below 100, ideally. HDL is so crucial, because it picks up fats accumulated along the arteries, and deposits it in your liver so your body can remove it. You can attempt to manage this purely by diet, but for a lot of people there is also a genetic component involved in both cholesterol management and plaque formation, so if your doctor then recommends going on an anti-cholesterol medication, you should highly consider doing both. Good sources of HDL are nuts, fatty fish, avocado, etc.

As far as managing LDL goes, increasing soluble fiber intake helps your body remove LDL. If you're not looking to eat bulk fibrous foods all the time, there are plenty of soluble fiber supplements out there, like psyllium and inulin, which will have the added bonus of giving you some satisfying shits.

EDIT: almost forgot to mention aerobic exercise, which also has been associated with increasing HDL and decreasing LDL, as well as just being good for your cardiovascular conditioning. Obviously, if you're already having symptoms of atherosclerosis, please do consult your doctor before jumping into rigorous exercise.

THANK YOU. My husband's legal name is an extremely common nickname for an extremely common full name. Essentially, it's like his legal name is "Steve," and everyone assumes it's short for Steven...but it's not! This has led to so many headaches- with banking, identity documents, professional licenses, even medical records.

I considered an EV for my last car purchase, ended up getting a hybrid instead for two reasons- there aren't many chargers off the 95 corridor (though there have been more installed in recent years), and the fact that my house frequently loses power. Every winter there is at least one storm where my entire town loses powers for >24hr; this winter, we had a 4 day outage and a 2 day outage. We do have a generator, but it's only powerful enough to make sure my fridge/freezer/hot water stay on, and I don't feel like dropping thousands to install one that could charge a car.

I'll do you one better- our Nimbex and Precedex bags used to look the same, as they were mixed in pharmacy. RN took someone elses' bag of Nimbex from the tube station and threw it on her Dex line on a non-intubated patient without scanning as it was about to run dry. Patient expired.

Cardiac ICU- occasionally we will infuse meds into a VENOUS sheath in some circumstances, like if the interventionalist wants to leave it in place, or uses it to place a Swan/TVP. In that setting, I will run a KVO to keep it patent, or use it for inotropes if I have no other central access. But I'm making damn sure it's venous, confirmed on X-ray, with an "OK to use" order. Technically our facility uses different color sheaths for arterial and venous and be adequately labeled, but I've seen exceptions to that. If I'm ever in doubt, I'm going to at least transduce the sheath and see what waveform I get (arterial sheaths *should* be transduced if left in anyway). Then I'm asking for radiological confirmation before I do anything else to it.

Yeah, I'm with you on that one. At my facility you need at least a year on critical care before you are even eligible to train for IABPs, and most nurses ask for more time. This is a perfect example as to why- you need those core skills down pat before you add something like this into the mix.

I see so many red flags in this post, and none of them are your fault. I see a new grad being forced into a leadership role they're not ready for, lateral violence from their peers, inadequate training, false promises from an employer, and a Swiss cheese incident where your EHR did not flag an allergy.

All of this should have you running- not walking- to the exit. I know 3k can be painful to give back, but in the grand scheme of things, is your mental health at work worth less than that? I broke a contract with a sign on bonus once upon a time- after speaking with HR, I was able to get some of it prorated for time served, and the rest I paid back on a payment plan so I didn't have to drain my savings all at once. It was the best decision I had ever made.

I love this idea. The hardest part for me with my 9 week loss was the lack of anything physical to prove that I really was pregnant, and really did feel that little life inside. Like when I've lost other loved ones, there was always some sort of keepsake or memento- like how I have my grandma's favorite necklace, and a letter from my late friend- and, of course, a body to bury.

My mom came over last week and we ended up making two keepsakes- a sealed terrarium with mini ferns and moss, and pressed flowers from my favorite meadow that were blooming when my little one's light was flickering. My husband is making a wooden frame, and I plan on covering my one ultrasound picture in the pressed flowers when they're done and putting it in his frame. I don't think I'll have the courage to hang it any time soon, but I'll have it. Making both have been extremely therapeutic for me.

I left the Philly burbs for Maine for that reason back in 2020. My husband and I were paying $1300 for what was essentially a studio apartment that was falling down around us, full of mold, with janky electrical, and no parking. It was an hour commute to our jobs, because anything closer would have bankrupted us. That same apartment is listed for over 2k now with no renovations done. We rented a 3 br house in Bangor for less than our studio when we first moved, and paid the same amount of money for a house + land in Waldo county that would have barely covered a falling-down burned out rowhome with a squatter in the basement in Philly.

Now the cost of living has absolutely increased since we moved here. But it's skyrocketed by my parents' in South NJ.

It was the perfect place to be a kid- safe, a quaint downtown with mom-and-pop pizza & ice cream shops to spend your allowance at, plenty of places to ride bikes or play street hockey, a few patches of woods to misbehave in, a ton of local kid lore about a haunted witch house, everything within biking distance.

It's so different now. Most of those woods have been razed and replaced with McMansions. I rarely see kids on bikes or playing in cul-de-sacs. The downtown is mostly designer boutiques and stuffy bistros. And most importantly, the property values have skyrocketed, and it is now mostly old tech or finance DINKs. I moved across the country once I saw where home was headed.

Oh yeah, you can absolutely get a rock-solid career with an associates, I didn't mean to imply you couldn't. Just that there are some bullshit policies out there.

I can tell you that career advancement can be difficult with an ADN, some hospitals require a BSN to get clinical ladder raises. Stupid, but it is what it is.

I'm an RN with an unrelated bachelor's. I did my accelerated BSN in PA, so I don't have first hand experience with USM, but I have precepted a few of their students, and oriented some grads to my unit. All in all, it seems to be a good quality program.

Real Pergo laminate flooring for like 0.99/sqft. They had just enough boxes for my basement- I had two planks left! Whew!

"So um" "Yup" "MMmmhm" "I see" *SIGH*

^A full-ass report that states everything you need to know about the situation.

That's so interesting. I've only ever worked in one CVICU, so I was really surprised to hear from one of our Locums that he and others only ever place V wires. I had no idea A-wires were technically more difficult, but it makes sense. In our shop, everyone gets A+V, and I tend to AAI or DDD pace my fresh post ops 99% of the time unless they develop an atrial arrhythmia. The only time I go for VVI is as a low backup or when I'm bolusing amio/lopressor/dilt for a-fib.

I usually boil some water in whatever pot/pan I cooked in to loosen the sticky bits, then scour it out over the fire pit with salt and crumpled up tin foil or steel wool if I remembered to bring it. It's not enough moisture to put out the flames, and I build the fire back up over the scraps to incinerate them. Soiled foil/wool goes in the bear canister if I'm in a bear hotzone.

I also just don't make foods I know will be a headache. We used to always do scrambled eggs in the morning, but it can be hard to avoid stickage on uneven heat from a fire. Now we usually do softboiled, poached, etc.

This really is the move. I always rotate my shoes between shifts. When I was pregnant, I even would swap them halfway through the day!

I work 12s and am on my feet for pretty much all of it... then most days off, I hike or putz around doing farm chores on my property.

The secret is having several *different* pairs of comfortable shoes. So if I work two days in a row, I wear my Sanitas clogs (highly recommend, way better than Dansko) the first day, then my Birkis the next day. Three in a row, I throw my crosstrainers in for added variety. Then at home, I rotate between Blundstone boots and Birkenstocks. Sure, I own a lot of shoes, but each pair also lasts longer this way, too.

Also do not sleep on good quality compression socks! That's half the battle right there. My absolute favorite are Wellow, but they're pricy when not on sale.

OK, but the verbal abuse from an instructor over the course of semester is also a completely different type of stress than screaming pts or bystanders.

I believe it. The difference is probably the fact that the instructors have the power to pass her or fail her, so any perceived insult or rudeness is amplified x 100. An abusive coworker or patient can be tuned out, but an abusive instructor has the ability to flunk you from the program, and that sucks.

I remember when my husband was in paramedic school, he was frustrated to the point of tears by a really power-trippy instructor. He came home from class as usual one afternoon, then burst open when I asked him how his day went- he ended up showing me some absolutely outrageous emails he had received from one of his instructors that were 100000% inappropriate. Now mind you, he's a multiple-tour army vet, with years of EMT experience prior to medic school. It takes a lot to wear him down.

As it turns out, other classmates were having the same experience, and they ended up documenting all the issues they had with the dean. He wasn't fired right away, but a short time later I became an adjunct in the nursing department of the same CC, and he was conspicuously no longer on the roster.

I get what you mean as a fellow rural New Englander. Like sure I have a grocery store that's 12 minutes away, but if I want something besides the most basic of necessities, it's 45 minutes to big grocer that will have even a shred of specialty or ethnic food. I work in healthcare, as does the rest of my family, and none of us would permit ourselves to be treated at the rinky dink hospital that's 20 minutes away, and have all made a pact to haul ass to the 45 min away semi-decent hospital if one of us has an emergency. I also refuse to work at said rinky dink hospital.

But at the end of the day, living in the woods without any evidence of other humans existing noticeable from my property makes it worth it for me.

Yeah, well, these hills are fun and accessible. I don't need survival gear to summit a mountain in my local chunk of the AT, I can do it with boots and granola bars alone. In just an afternoon I can go from sea level to a summit that gives me a breathtaking 360 degree view of forest and coast, and then make it back down to sea level in time to watch the sunset with a lobster roll and Allagash in hand.

It's not that I don't appreciate the grandeur of the Tetons and Rockies; I just prefer the scale of my local "hills." They're scaled for humans to enjoy, not just giants. And I love it.

I'm a female nurse. I'm also married to a man. I rarely have a day at work go by where I don't have to come in contact with male genitalia one way or another. It's so blasé for me, I may as well be handling a limp, uncooked bratwurst most of the time.

Does this mean I don't respect my husband by OP's logic?

My favorite is to buy a bag of frozen grilled chicken breast strips, and then put them in a big ziploc with sliced peppers and onions with fajita spices and some hot sauce. It marinates as it thaws in the cooler while we set up camp and enjoy our day. Then, pop it all to simmer in some beer in a big ol cast iron over the fire. Toast some tortillas over open flame, then enjoy some really good fajitas around the fire. I usually make it with some instant yellow rice as a side.