Registered Nurse, North Mississippi Medical Center

>> My name is Catisse Black Rutherford [phonetic]. I'm a registered nurse at the North Mississippi Medical Center in Tupelo, Mississippi. In any one day my job can consist of 12 hours scheduled. Could be more depending on how my day goes. As a nurse, I perform many duties within those 12 hours. Of course, the more familiar duties of a nurse are giving meds, performing tasks and treatments, collaborating with the physicians and other healthcare professionals to provide safe care to our patients but we wear so many hats, nurses. We're that sister that's holding dad's hand -- I mean brother's hand while, you know, nobody else can be there. Or you know we're social worker for so many too. So it's just the wide variety of tasks that we perform on a day to day basis. With nursing, you can specialize. So you can work with pediatric patients. You can work with adult patients. I work in the intensive care unit so I specialize there and at one point, I've done neurosurgery and orthopedics. Most days -- most nurses work 12 hour shifts, 7 a to 7 p or 7 p to 7 a. You can be on a 3 2 split which would be Saturday, Sunday, Monday, off Tuesday, Wednesday, and go accordingly like that. I work a weekend schedule only because I'm currently in nurse practitioner school as well. So I work Saturday, Sunday, Monday is considered a weekend. The nursing is so flexible and very diverse. That's one thing I love about it. So you can pretty much decide what you want to do. The neurosurgery and orthopedics floor was a medical surgical floor which is what most people think of when they think of nursing and that's kind of where you can just get any general kind of presentations. Nausea, vomiting or you may get your more specialized patients with the orthopedics if they've had a car wreck or had hip surgery or something like that. I made the decision to go to the intensive care unit just so I could provide more specialized care and only have two patients. [ Silence ]