I love newFNP

She refers to herself in the third person in a very not-annoying way. She is not afraid of the well-placed f-bomb. She provides excellent insight into the aspects of practice that my lecture professors are not even hinting at.

Go read. Really.

She reminded me of the importance of diction when talking with patients -

It took me the entire med-surg rotation to recognize that the reason that I was getting frustrated when trying to assess my patient's pain was related to my own diction...

On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being no pain at all and 10 being the worst pain you can imagine, where would you say your pain is right now?

My belly.

Oh. I see. Yes, ma'am, I see here that you have multiple abscess caths and even a PBD* or two, so I imagine that your pain is centered in your belly. What with the bile duct cancer and all. But how bad is it? Because, as the staff nurse who sent me in here to ask you so kindly pointed out, you won't be getting a single speck of your potential 15 mg of PRN oxycodone until you give me a number.


*It took me forever to find out that PBD stands for Percutaneous Biliary Drain, and then an equally long time to realize that I would actually be draining plastic bags of bile hanging off of this woman 3x/day. Doesn't bile digest its way through plastic? Shouldn't these things be glass or silicon or something?