For the Math-o-phobic Nursing Students

I was already halfway down the hospital corridor to my patient's room with a syringe full of IV Digoxin in my hand, when something stopped me. In past blogs I've mentioned a nurse's infamous gut instinct when it comes to sensing that something isn't right. Well, on this night, only a couple hours into my 7pm-7am overnight shift on the med-surg floor, my gut instinct kicked in and propelled me right back down the corridor to the nurse's station. I had calculated the Digoxin dosage by hand and also by calculator but my instinct was right. The decimal point was still in the wrong place. If I had pushed that amount of medicine directly into my patient's vein, there's a good chance that he would have gone into cardiac arrest. Moral of the story for nursing students: The best calculators and computers will never replace good old-fashioned math skills and the human brain that processes them. That night on the floor was ironic. I had earned straight A's on all my medication dosage calculation tests during nursing schools (I wonder if they still teach nursing students to calculate dosages manually). In case you think I'm bragging, I'd like to point out that until nursing school my cumulative math score was somewhere around a C-. I hated and feared math and all math related skills growing up. However, once I had conquered my initial math-o-phobic panic attack when faced with my first medication dosage test in nursing school, I had a revelation – math is fun when it's applied to something you're interested in. As nursing students this is important advice to take to heart. If nursing is your chosen profession, do not allow fear of the known or unknown to detour you from your goals. Nursing school sometimes feels like an impossible amount of studying and coursework but you will get through it. The same is true for the nursing boards (which I will cover in a future blog). I transformed my fear of math into an interest and a respect for it. Rely on the technology available, but always remember my story of how a human brain that used to fear math, used it to save a life.

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For the Math-o-phobic Nursing Students

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