<p>“hmm. anyone know anything about chemical engineers or any other medicine fields other than pharmacy?”</p>
<p>My wife is a hospice nurse with a two-year degree, in her fifth year of work. Her income is just slightly below the mean (according to BLS Statistics) of chemical engineers in the country (who would have 15-20 years of experience), and she nets more than our local physician (she has no insurance, office, staff, payroll, billing, or bureaucracy costs.) She makes well more than most public health Ph.Ds (I know, 'cause I worked with them), and a little less than the base salary for ARNPs in our area. The median salary for a pharmacist in our area is substantially higher than all of the above (but if you figure out the education costs of an extra six years, and the salary foregone in those six years, it would take the average pharmacist about 20-25 years to catch up to my wife.)</p>
<p>She works basically 8-4 (plus time charting, for which she is paid time-and-a-half), sets her own daily schedule, and is on call one weekend and one evening a month. She is also paid 55 cents a mile for the use of her car, and has great benefits. </p>
<p>She never sees the inside of a hospital, or a doctor’s office (unless, for the latter, the doctor is recalcitrant in fulfilling her “request/order” - the doctors almost never see the patients.) (She does spend a lot of time correcting doctors’ mistakes and pharmacy screw-ups - I hear about them nightly.) She works with families along with social workers and an occasional chaplain, or with facility nurses (when she works in a facility), and with pharmacies. She aims to make patients and families comfortable (if the patient wants nothing but root beer floats for three weeks, she gets root beer floats for three weeks). She doesn’t make anyone take their cholesterol meds. She loves her job.</p>
<p>When she left college 30 years ago, she was an art major.</p>