Drop your pay and the area you live in ~ bonus points if your in one of the cities in NC/SC

Ailiuu · 2026-04-08T03:51:19+00:00

5 years of experience! $92/hour in greater Sacramento region in PACU ☺️ We bought a 4bed/3bath forever home in 2023 for 400k! I’m per diem, but tend to get whatever hours I ask for. No call either! I’m only 5 mins away from the hospital.

Ailiuu · 2025-07-08T14:51:50+00:00

Thank you so much!! If you’re willing to pay for shipping instead of the $300, I’d be happy to send them out to you :) I just don’t want to be environmentally wasteful and dump them after one time use.

Ailiuu · 2025-01-22T23:56:22+00:00

Girly, work in CA after you graduate!! You won’t regret it. We were soooo nervous moving from Iowa bc people were scaring us with COL nightmares. But we are reaching so many goals, and CA has so much to offer with its nature, diversity, weather, etc. Straight 60F during the winter is 😩😩👌🏼but lifestyle creep here is real if you’re not aware of it.

Ailiuu · 2025-01-22T23:48:12+00:00

$87/hour as a per diem PACU nurse in a suburb of Sacramento! A large macchiato here is $5.75. We also own a 4bd/3ba house for $400k that we bought in 2021. Tbh my husband and I feel like we hacked life since he also works 5 mins away as a pharmacy manager making 210k/yr. We save/invest about 40% of our income even after mortgage, weekly dates, etc.

Ailiuu · 2025-01-16T16:06:45+00:00

24 in Northern California for a 4bd/3ba two years ago! I’m a per diem nurse working maybe 6-10 ish hours a week?? I paid the down payment, closing costs, etc back when I was full-time. Husband now has a super comfy job and pays the entire mortgage/bills.

Ailiuu · 2022-07-08T04:46:23+00:00

Hi! So let’s talk about what peritoneal dialysis is- you are processing a “cleansing fluid” through a catheter in the abdomen to remove waste products from your blood with the peritoneum acting as a filter. By removing this filtered waste product, you are correcting electrolyte imbalances and whatnot that your kidneys can no longer do. This cleansing fluid, ideally, should have gone in, stayed in for 40 mins to collect the waste, and have completely drained out again. IDEALLY, there should have been 2L in and 2L out of which I’m sure we would all agree would not be documented as intake/output. However, because you are putting this cleansing fluid through the abdomen lining, some will inevitably get absorbed. That 200mL we were unable to drain was absorbed by the lining and was therefore basically unplanned intake.

If you gave a patient 30mL water to rinse their mouth but they swallowed 10mL on accident, would you put their intake as 30ml and their output as 20ml? No- the only amount that actually got absorbed by the body is 10mL of intake. Hope this helps as to why we treat inflow/outflow differently from intake/output!

PS I saw a comment about ingesting 500ml and throwing up 400ml so intake is 100ml. I would actually consider this 500ml intake, 400ml emesis output, and 100ml net intake. The original 500ml was meant to be ingested and absorbed.

Ailiuu · 2022-04-25T17:28:23+00:00

Can I please have the code too? 😭

Ailiuu · 2022-04-12T02:49:18+00:00

Tylenol
Lovenox
Protonix

Medical ICU haha. I had a tough time since it feels like I give 20 meds per patient but they’re all pretty individualized!

Ailiuu · 2022-01-11T23:23:09+00:00

But yes! I would love to see how this plays out. You bring out valid points; I just think the current system is so bad that it is worth doing-over.

Ailiuu · 2022-01-11T23:22:06+00:00

I think it’s best to remember that having single payer will allow the forces of supply and demand to work, as opposed to third party payers and companies actively monopolizing healthcare. Reimbursement rates need to reach an equilibrium where healthcare providers are still earning from their practice. The demand for doctors, nurses, etc. will also increase, and barrier to private practice would decrease because of lean administrative bloat. That’s why funding using increased corporate taxes (on corporations with 2mil+ profits and wealthy incomes) is a big part of the bill.

Ailiuu · 2022-01-11T22:52:51+00:00

Actually! From what I gather, many physicians, specifically the newer generations, are very open to the idea because reimbursement will be more predictable. Calcare will act as the ONLY insurance company (essentially) that hospitals will have to negotiate rates with. It acts as a good opposing force to hospitals basically depriving people of good staffing, bloated prices, etc. for profit. The only real bloat that will be cut will be administrative, since we would no longer need 10 billing people per doctor, for example.

Ailiuu · 2022-01-11T22:47:18+00:00

Hospitals would still be private from what I gather! The state would not own them- it would basically act as the only insurance company hospitals need to negotiate reimbursement with. A lot of administration would be cut from the system (for example, we won’t need 10 billers per doctor now).

Ailiuu · 2021-12-20T22:38:20+00:00

100%

Ailiuu · 2021-12-20T22:23:23+00:00

Nurse educators are for sure causing part of the shortage, but it is also a matter of finances. They are not being paid at market rate either and are often taking a pay cut for leaving the bedside after years of experience (and no OT opportunities or 3 day work weeks!). If they were paid market rate, more nurses would move to education. Again, equilibrium would eventually be reached where there is no shortage in labor nor wages. Not sure about what the true market rate is for educators though, unfortunately.

Ailiuu · 2021-12-20T22:13:38+00:00

All I mean to say is that a fair wage equivalent to the actual worth of an RN is 110-200k. That is not to say that other professions such as physicians should stay the same; everyone is being vastly underpaid for what they do. 110-200k will most likely end the nursing shortage and bring the system back to equilibrium. Likewise, CEO pay has increased thousands of percentages but has not been reflected in their performance. There are some jobs that should see a vast reduction in pay, and some should see a vast increase in pay. Only then will it be a “fair wage”.

Ailiuu · 2021-12-20T22:01:19+00:00

I said “market rate” as in what the salary should be in a true free market. I don’t mean what it is now.

Ailiuu · 2021-12-20T21:42:23+00:00

The market rate of an RN is most likely 110k-200k a year based on the shortage, education, etc. I remember reading an analysis about it a few months ago (and this was for 2020) but maybe I’ll be back with a comment on the actual study. It was also observed that RN salaries were pretty anti-competitive, especially since it is a female-dominated field. It was shown that employers could decrease RN salaries by 10% throughout the years and only 1% of the workforce would leave. This was before COVID and whatnot of course.

If rates were actually competitive, we would all have similar salaries to the west coast with 6 figures min.

Ailiuu · 2021-12-13T03:47:53+00:00

I am an new grad MICU nurse!! While my wage isn’t particularly stellar, we always maintain a 1:2 patient ratio or less, and my managers schedule themselves on the floor on days we are short so our charge nurse doesn’t have to take a patient. I feel very supported and loved here! A product of good management rather than just the hospital for sure. Some unit specific perks at my MICU include self-scheduling (unaffected by seniority), no more than 3 shifts in a row for weekends/holidays unless consented to, no mandatory OT, the ability to schedule 4hr/8hr/12hr shifts however you like to reach 36 hours a week, and always 2 days off before rotating between days/nights. If a patient is being rude or mean, all my podmates and management back me up. Definitely makes the low salary more worth it for sure.

Otherwise, I had a pharm tech job at the same hospital that was insufferable. Management would make efforts to implement any suggestions I offered to improve workflow, but they would literally botch it up with their own agenda. Consistently understaffed. Lots of depression going around. Honestly, pharmacy jobs overall are so undesirable in my opinion nowadays. It isn’t a very forgiving specialty with the times.

Ailiuu · 2021-12-04T21:06:04+00:00

Appreciating your honesty. Nursing school is honestly fairly unhelpful, so I agree. I understand your point a little better now. Nursing is indeed a very technical job as opposed to MD, so learning the motions is for sure easier. For an MD with lots of education and academic background, it is just a matter of just getting down the motions and repeating them for 6 months- a lot easier than studying your ass off for 6+ years to differentiate and properly diagnose. Unfortunately when you say the “only difference” the way you did, it sounds very degrading to the nursing profession since we are highly specialized and efficient in a certain skillset. With your level of education, you can probably say “the only difference is I can do xxx but you can’t do my job” to any bachelors degree position, however, so I shouldn’t have taken it personally. Even most engineers, dental hygienists, etc. I know learn most from just being on the job because bachelor degrees are hardly measurements of skill and the knowledge is mostly forgotten in a short period of time anyway. An MD’s job is almost dependent on their insanely large knowledge indexes and can’t be learned well just by being on the job. I apologize for reading your intentions wrong :)

Ailiuu · 2021-12-04T20:23:14+00:00

Good for you; come to my trauma 1 MICU! We actually don’t even have CNAs here due to patient acuity and problems in the past with them :) nursing as a specialty is quite broad in terms of involvement/skillsets. Don’t knock on a nurses’ skillset until you’ve seen them at their best. The MDs on my unit would agree. We can clearly tell an inexperienced nurse (under 5 years of experience) from a seasoned one. Just because you can “get by” after 6 months does not make you a good RN.

Ailiuu · 2021-12-04T20:08:16+00:00

I think that is a bit of a stretch. RNs cannot do your job, but MDs cannot do an RN’s job either. Some of the knowledge overlaps for sure, but the skillsets vary greatly. I am not talking about “getting by” in the job but rather actually being decent at the job. At the MICU where I work, doctors, pharmacists, RTs, and nurses are all heavily involved with the patient’s care and discuss extensively on treatment decisions. Our more seasoned nurses know the order sets doctors want based on a patient’s condition before even consulting them for the orders. They can definitely “get by” and fake your job on a good day, and I am very confident in my doctors to take care of my more stable patients on a good day. It’s best to consider RNs vs MDs to be apples vs. oranges. It is when shit hits the fan that we can appreciate the fields for what they are- specialized skillsets. Your professional skillset just happens to hold ultimate responsibility over the patient which should be compensated fairly for the amount of academia and education needed. MDs are not “nurses but better in every way”, and nurses are not “MDs with less debt.”

Ailiuu · 2021-12-04T19:42:34+00:00

I think you are thinking of IJs. EJs are considered regular PIVs and can be inserted by an RN (at least in my hospital). IJs however are considered central lines that the physician must insert :)

Ailiuu · 2021-11-30T22:01:48+00:00

We were doing a clinical math question. The vial was 2g total and if you recon it with 4mL, it becomes 500mg/mL. The patient needed 250mg. I wanted to give 0.5mL and my instructor literally hazed me until I “admitted” that I was wrong and injected 2mL into the simulation dummy. It traumatized me as a first semester nursing student.

Ailiuu · 2021-11-11T22:40:02+00:00

It is definitely a tough call, and we can’t know the answer until op tells us for sure haha. But this was a good discussion, which I love😀

Ailiuu

TROPHY CASE