Probably a really scary time living it, but it's a great story now.
My question: Does JMC Jr. have his own PCF account, and have you ever accessed it for shill bidding purposes?
I'm sure he will one day, but not yet. As soon as he learns to play poker in a few years and inevitably starts whooping my ass just a couple of years into joining my home game, he's going to want his own set of chips that my buddies and I are going to inevitably pay for once he takes enough from us
Not sure how I feel about him having an account here before he's of legal gambling age though. Perhaps as a birthday present along with the
CPC custom set I'm having made for him in the coming months.
Are you babysitting (or being a parent) this weekend?
I'm on dad duty with my son. And yes, I do say "watching" him, to assure that he doesn't kill himself. He's an adventurous little bugger.
what is the atomic weight of hydrogen ?
1.00784 u
Why did you choose your profession? Do you feel like as a whole (pay, goodwill, insurance/retirement, self fulfillment, etc.) you’re compensated or happy enough to stay in this field for the duration of your working years?
What does your wife do for a living (I think I might remember she’s in a similar role/field?) Do you feel like one of your jobs/roles/careers is slightly more important than the others, whether it be due to pay, hours, stress, impact on others?
I grew up in it. My father is a cardiologist and I started working in his office filing charts and taking vital signs on his patients before he saw them since I was 14. The "plan" was to go to medical school, but 18 year old me didn't want to commit to 7 more years of school, plus 3 years of residency, plus how ever many more years of fellowship...you get the idea. If I went that route, I'd really only just be starting to pay off my medical school expenses. By going through nursing school, yes, my parents and scholarships paid the tuition, which was a huge blessing coming out of undergrad debt free, I paid my own way through NP school using my work wages. Younger sister is also halfway through medical school and is well on her way to absorbing my father's practice if she wants it.
As a nurse practitioner, I'm definitely compensated fairly for the medical aspect of the job. What nursing school and medical school don't prepare you for is all of the social and even legal issues that you will face. Yeah, we have malpractice insurance that protects us well enough, but I was really shocked and disheartened by the amount of distrust and vitriol that is directed towards nurses, doctors, and other healthcare personnel. There are good days where you feel like that you really helped someone, but there are also days that I want to walk away from it all and open my own restaurant (which if money and lack of experience was not a factor, I'd want to do), but doing that is just as if not more challenging than what I do now. Not to mention I have absolutely no business or economic background to do it viably.
At the end of the day, I'm happy with what I am doing, but I would be remiss to not mention the difficulties and the drawbacks of the profession. My job honestly is pretty awesome, though, outside of the whole COVID thing. I work 5 days a week, two weekend days a month (with a day off during the week of my choosing to make up for it), can waltz into work at 9:30 in the morning if I want to, but can also go in earlier if I want without and repercussion. It's all about the bottom line at the end of the day. As long as I meet my quota of patients that I need to see (yes, that's a thing), the higher ups don't say anything. Four of the past five days this past week, I got to work at 9:30 and was out by 4. No other NP job offers the potential to do this.
As far as retirement goes, eh, the company I work for has a 401k plan we can contribute to, but they don't match any contributions which irks me a bit, but I'm putting away 15% of my pretax income for it, and if there's any left after the whole COVID thing, my wife and I will be just fine and I'll be on track to retire at 65 or somewhere in that neighborhood if I wanted to. Job security is usually very good, but even so, an out of work NP can find work in a matter of days. There is always a need somewhere.
You remember correctly; my wife is a nurse as well. Bedside nursing is much, much tougher than my job now, even with the increased responsibility. Bedside nursing suckssssssss. They should be paid double what they make and should make more than I do honestly. They're the eyes and ears of the whole healthcare industry. Scrubs absolutely had it right; if you piss off one nurse, you piss off all of them. They're like the hospital mafia. No one is safe. Doctors, surgeons, patients and families. If you're rude to one nurse, you're a marked man/woman, and it's hard to get back in the good graces. If you think about it, they're the ones that make sure that you're getting the right medications at the right doses and making sure that the doctors don't kill you by overdosing or underdosing a medication, they're the ones making sure you're fed and hydrated, they're the ones talking to your family for the most part (trust me, an unsolicited all from a doctor or NP is almost always bad news, you don't want to hear from us unless you ask to speak with us), they're wiping your asses when you're too weak to get up and go to the bathroom, and they're holding your loved one's hand when they're in their final moments of life. Nurses are definitely more important than anyone else in the whole healthcare industry. That being said, it's hard and literally back breaking work. I worked bedside nursing for a year and decided that I was going back to grad school of some kind to get away from it.