As yourself this.... Do you like the idea of being a well paid waiter? Except instead of simply taking people's orders and bringing them food, you have to be at their beck and call for everything they need done. Additionally, imagine being a waiter, and the chefs tell you to go out and convince the patrons to eat something they haven't ordered and probably don't like. That's nursing in a nutshell. You walk around a floor answering call lights, performing tasks ordered by physicians, and having too much to do with too little time to do it all in. If you do have patients you like or want to spend more time with, you won't actually have time to do it. If you are lucky, you'll have a good boss and good coworkers. If you are not lucky, you'll have both a boss and coworkers you can't stand. And you spend 12 hours at a time around grouchy and or terrified patients and family, and possibly grouchy and or terrified coworkers. Everything is getting over regulated to the point where it seems everything you do needs to be double documented or confirmed with a coworker before you can do it. It's not like tv. Imagine everything you see on tv and then the nurses having to go back later and do paperwork on all the fancy stuff you saw them do when the gunshot victim came in. And the conversations with your peers you think you'll have are fiction. We don't have time to talk much, let alone any socializing. It's work from the time you get there to the tone you leave 12 and a half hours later, with the exception of a half hour lunch when your boss tells you to take it. You will go to lunch while your coworker watches his or her patients and yours. Then it will be your turn to watch 10-12 patients while they go eat. It's only 3 days a week, but most of my coworkers have to take sleep aids the night before they come back to work or else they stay up all night thinking about hat the next day holds in store for them. Patients arguing with us, family members telling us we don't know anything, mistakes made because of the crunch for time, and not simply because we suck at being nurses. All your work needs to get done whether you have 4 hard patients and one easy one, or 4 easy ones and one hard one. We live for our days off, believe me. On a day when your stomach is slightly upset, you gotta put on your airline stewardess smile and suck it up for 12 hours because nobody cares. Sick days? Don't take too many or get fired. It's a job where you are in front of people all day, every day. That's a med surg. ER is better in some ways and worse in others. Icu is the same. Better nurse to patient ratios, but patients that are train wrecks. Example: Doctor orders a large dose of a medication that will make your 400lb unconscious patient crap... All the time. That means bed changes, and moving hefting things covered in liquid poop. Or you get an AIDS patient with dementia that pulls out their lines every chance they get, flinging blood all over and requiring new line placement.
Thats just a taste. I don't mind all that most of the time, but that's me, and I'm in NP school and have a way out pretty soon. My point is, know exactly what you are getting into. I stared out gung ho and loved nursing... Briefly... And while administration treated us well. Things changed, and while we still get paid well and treated ok, the rules and regs have rained down to the point where we are being suffocated with documentation, and procedures, and micromanagement. As a job, it has perks, but the job itself is mostly pretty rough. It's a whole shift of waiting for something to happen to mess up the schedule you've set up to get everything done.
Contrast that with computer science... Solving puzzles all day. I'm sure it has down sides, but it's a completely different lifestyle than being a nurse. I think one of the main things about nursing I didn't expect or understand was the intensity with which I have people and situations tugging at me from all sides in a given shift. It's made worse by the fact that many are frivolous and unnecessary. So think about what that's like before you retool your future to accomodate your impression of nursing. It's a big jump from where you are, and you might not like it when you get there, but by then you are committed. That's time you won't get back.
