Career As A Respiratory Therapist?

I'm currently taking prerequisite courses for the Respiratory Therapy Program. I wanted to know the pros and cons of the career. To those of you that are Respiratory Therapist do you find your job as stressful or equal to a RN?

Respiratory Therapy is good because you don't have to deal with feces and urine. You do have to work with sputum and blood. If you don't like operating needles, then you might have trouble performing arterial blood gases. RTs have more patients than nurses do. You would have less one-on-one patient contact than as a nurse. Some nurses only have a few patients. An RT might have 15 or 20. That's a lot of chest x-rays, blood gases, and treatment information to remember.

I think the best thing for you to do is shadow an RT and a Nurse. Chances are that your RT program prerequisites can be used to get you into a nursing program also.

From my experience, my RT program didn't have a cut-off, there was not a problem getting clinical placements, and I went straight through. The nursing program at my college was bad for benching people on waiting lists because they had so many people wanting to become nurses. It was very hard work and at times seemed impossible. However, I made it through with a lot of studying and determination.

Compared to how my mom is when she comes home from work, I think that RTs are not as attached to their patients and therefore less likely to 'bring their work home' with them.

An RT program would be less difficult to get into, less difficult to stay in, and would get you a very good job when you graduated. I would talk to nursing and RT students who are nearing the end of their programs to gauge how it was for them.

Ok.. I love my job as a Respiratory Therapist for the fact that we do not have to deal w/ poo and pee... However... we do not get the pay of an RN, and the respect... we also do not get the choices that an RN get in terms of getting to work in schools, dr offices, etc...
If I had it to do over I would hate to say it I think I would have went to nursing school...
I love being a respiratory therapist don't get me worng... both jobs are equally stressful!
we deal w/ death the same, the same amount of patieent care, etc.....