Weird Interview Questions

An interesting article in an e-magazine for nurses, Advance for Nurses caught my attention and got me thinking. What would I do if I was asked weird questions like this in an interview?

Weirdest Questions
They asked me to tell them about myself. Then as each took turns asking me questions, things got strange. One guy asked me to name 10 ways to find a needle in a haystack. Another wanted to know how many gallons of water it took to put out an average house fire. What almost put me over the edge was when one of them asked me how many things I could do with a marshmellow. I couldn't tell her what I was actually thinking!

What was the strangest question you were asked in an interview? Send us your responses: mmatta@merion.com

If you send in some weird interview moments to the author of that article, leave a comment here, too...I'm curious how weird it could get...

Photo Credit

Grand Rounds in Prose

Dr. Hebert never fails to disappoint. Check out this week's Grand Rounds with a nod to Edgar Allen Poe.

Carve A Virtual Pumpkin

As many of you are now experiencing or can remember, nursing students have no life. This includes me. I have an embarrassing admission to make. I purchased big, perfectly formed pumpkins with the pipe dream of finding the time to carve them in a rare family activity. Since it never happened and I am one of the "uncool" folks in the neighborhood with 5 uncarved pumpkins on my porch, I thought this website was appropriate.

This is the coolest thing I've seen off the internet in quite some time. Simple, no cookies, no download games....just a pumpkin you can carve.

When you're done, be sure to click the done button for a neat surprise.

Happy Halloween!
http://www.cubpack81.com/images/carve_pumpkin.swf

Mission Impossible

"Your mission, young student nurse, should you choose to accept it, is to perform trach care (a sterile technique) without turning an already critically ill patient hypoxic."

Seem easy? Please enlighten me as to how in the heck this is even possible? My instructor suggested to try and do it while holding your breath. This will give us a sense of what your patient feels in regards to O2 loss.

So here's the deal, I barely had my sterile gloves donned and q-tips wet before I myself was gasping for a breath.

Do tell, oh wise nurses, how is this procedure even possible without breaking sterile technique and still keeping your patient alive....

(by the way, this guy's trach ties are WAY too tight!)

Power Trips and Flowers from the ER

Acute Med/Surg started yesterday. By the end of the day, my head felt like exploding. My lead faculty for the course has what equates to alphabet soup behind her name...MS, RN, APRN (I thought the RN was unnecessary but I am but a lowly student with a mere BA behind my name.) She, by the way, is a PhD student who, in her free time, writes grants requesting palm pilots for her students. (I recieved mine yesterday and find it most useful in entertaining myself with JawBreaker during boring lecture where the powerpoints are being read to me.)

So, in a genuine effort to be positive about the next 8 weeks, I am trying my best to get past the question that has plagued me since I started nursing school, "What is up with middle aged female nurses deciding to be nurse educators and then becoming drunk in their authority over the students?" Teach me, mentor me, but please spare me from the the "almighty nurse educator" persona. If you deserve my admiration and respect, you will surely receive it. Rub your sickening authority complex in my face for 8 hours and I will withhold my respect on purpose.

In unrelated news, I picked up a Wall Street Journal yesterday. The article, titled Hospitals Open Up Space in The ER, goes into details of "boarding",

One solution gaining adherents is the Full Capacity Protocol, a standard developed by Peter Viccellio, clinical director of the emergency department at Stony Brook University Medical Center. When his hospital emergency room is full and patients are being boarded in hallways, the emergency department can begin transferring patients to halls in other units, spreading the burden of care around the hospital -- and ratcheting up the pressure on those units to free up beds by discharging patients who are fine to go home. Data he presented at the New Orleans meeting showed that one-third of patients being boarded in the Stony Brook emergency department last year were transferred to other units, and 20% waited less than an hour to get into a room once in those units. "If the emergency department has to hold patients, no one has any incentive to open beds," says Dr. Viccellio. "But put patients in other hallways, and rooms magically appear." To appease patients who have been boarded, the hospital adopted a formal policy to send flowers once they are in a room.

Excellent article, quick read. I recommend it.

Halloween and Acute Care Med/Surg

Our town has a wonderful second hand clothing store and I always seem to find great deals there. Today I blew a wad of cash on fall and winter stuff for the two little kids (if it were only that simple for the two older ones).

Girl will be Eeyore this year ($12). Boy will be a frog. (Girl's costume last year-$0) Shamelssly showing these pictures to their prom dates in 13 years....PRICELESS!

OB is finally coming to an end. Just a cumulative final next week and its on to Acute Care Med/Surg. Chest tubes and suction freak me out just a bit. I told myself if I can handle watching all the reefing of a c-section, and all the "bodily fluids" of a vaginal delivery, suction and chest tubes may not seem so bad.

I think I can, I think I can...