5 must-read nurse blogs

Auntie Agatha has a large stable of blogs she visits on a regular basis. Here are the top five, in no particular order:

Codeblog: Tales of a Nurse
Gina tells it like it is, and has the experience and smarts to make you seriously reconsider your decision to become a critical-care RN. She’s recently decided on a career change, but the archives alone are worth whatever you paid to get your degree.

ER Nurses Blog
Hilarious, disgusting, thought-provoking. This blog reminds me why I don’t work in the emergency department, and why I admire those who do.

Abilene Rob
Full disclosure: Rob is one of my closest buddies. He’s also a fairly new nurse, coming up on his first anniversary next month. Given that he’s done everything in the world for 10 minutes at a time, including being an active-duty Marine, he always has a good story. He doesn’t update regularly enough for my tastes, but again, the archives are worth reading.

Mediblogopathy
I’m sorta kinda cheating here, as this is an aggregator, but it’s the best dadgum aggregator of blogs on the ‘Net. Everything you want, from pediatrics in Europe to student nurses in the U.S., is here. Make sure you have plenty of free time before you go down this particular rabbit hole.

Madness: Tales of an Emergency Room Nurse
Warning: profanity. This is, hands-down, the most raw exploration of inner-city, crappy-situation nursing I’ve read in a long time. If you need to feel as though someone somewhere understands what you’re going through, read this.

Not nursing, but I couldn’t resist:
Rickety Contrivances of Doing Good
Susan is an English professor and a chaplain at a hospital. Or was a chaplain; she recently worked her last shift. Go look up her ED Sonnet cycle. “Right now I feel less holy than a head of cabbage” was the line that grabbed and held me, and has held me ever since.