The craziness

[fredericks]

It was one of those nights that had me sitting in the nurse's lounge afterward staring at nothing. One of those nights that just knocked me down and then yanked my arm up at an uncomfortable angle, forcing me to ask for another. I went to IHOP on the way home and bought a stack of pancakes, slathered those jammies in butter, drowned 'em in syrup, and slurped 'em down without giving a good gorram because, dammit, I'm allowed.

The odd part? I'd had the same area the night before ("area" being room assignments) and it was heaven: not a single patient called me during the night and everyone's vitals were stable. Last night? I had a transfer come over from telemetry with a crazy high BP, had another transfer from tele cancel on me at the last minute, an EtOH patient on Ativan taper with a heart rate of 137 and a slowly rising BP (when I left his heart rate had made its way to 113 but his BP had jumped to 170/100), a former tele patient present with elevated BP, complaint of persistent headache, and the dreaded "shoulder/chest pain" (envision this patient rubbing her left upper chest and grimacing, then imagine me quietly freaking the fuck out)...precipitating two stat EGKs, numerous calls to physicians, stat cardiac enzyme labwork, and one fredericks falling behind in all her paperwork while praying to On High that I wouldn't have to deal with a code situation. THEN came the admit from the ER who was MRSA (a nice bit of information the ER forgot to tell me) but placed in a non-isolation room, unclear orders from said patients admitting personnel (was it a PA or an MD who wrote the orders? does it matter, because the person was an IDIOT), a mad scramble to take follow-up BPs at 6AM, and THEN (THEN) getting chewed out by the bitch of a nurse I gave report to for not getting the late admit's paperwork clarified (hey, bitch, I didn't get to pick up the orders until 5AM or so, and even then I was so goddamn busy I had to ask another nurse to transcribe them for me), along with getting bugged by the IV nurse about placing a patient on the board for a new IV lock (I actually lied and said I'd attempted to stick the patient twice unsuccessfully, and then ran and hid from the nurse before I could see whether he confirmed my story with the patient or not).

Deep effin' breath

Okay. I'm okay. I've had my flapjacks, I'm horizontal with some great fic in a couple of collapsed windows of my taskbar, a cranberry-scented candle is burning on my bookshelf, The Price is Right just wrapped up, and I don't have to go back to work tonight. I don't have to go back to work tonight. I can go to the gym and work off my aggression (and those sweet sweet pancakes), I can stay in and play with my Wii (that phrasing never stops amusing me), I can pull out my eyemask, chug some NyQuil, and force my hyped-up ass to sleep because I don't have to go back to work tonight. Halleluia and Amen.

An interesting moment from work: there's a new subintern on the floor. I kept looking at the guy and thinking that I knew him from somewhere, possibly HS. Of course, being my anti-social self I chose to ignore the situation and play dumb. Today we actually interacted and he balled up enough to ask me if I'd gone to Science too. So, ta-da!, turns out we were in the same class. I found that slightly depressing, truth be told. I'm not sure I can articulate why at the moment, so let me move on to

An "eww!" or effin' hilarious moment at work (and I'm as surprised there was one as anyone else whose made his/her way through all the crap above): a discussion on patients who decide to "take things in hand". At the top of the night I shared with a co-worker my dislike of a certain area on the floor. The area in question is one with a patient with severe digit amputation, a gent who requires catherization every three to four hours to empty his bladder. While I was taking care of him this gentlemen slipped and referred to his mangled partially amputated feet as "meat", and the psych major in me freaked out a bit. Shortly afterward I found him, erm, playing the skinflute. Mind you, the man's fingers are amputated down to the second knuckle so, you know, perseverance and ingenuity and all that jazz but ewwwwwww. So very ewww. That he quickly went from mild-mannered nice guy to cursing-up-a-storm guy when undergoing urethral spasms also struck me as weird. Again, you know, spasms aren't little walks in the park, but it was just odd. I told all this to the nurse and she went on about how he was such a nice guy and, no way!, nothing odd about him, yadda yadda yadda. My opinion? Sixty days plus in a hospital will screw up anyone.

So the dude who'd drawn the guy's area last night started talking about the same nurse and the way he gently pointed out to her that the patient in question didn't get hard from the aforementioned spasms but from, ahem, dancing with himself. My co-worker did not want to believe this gent was he-bopping so frequently in the bed until the dude repeated himself a couple of times, finally sharing his incidences of finding evidence of the, uhm, "crime" in the patient's sheets. Mmore eww - because the patient gets straight-cath'd so frequently his urethra has apparently undergone some trauma: his emissions have blood in them. The dude is obligated to ask the patient where the blood is coming from, even though both of them know...you know. God, the things I get paid to endure.

/mortification

I'm off tonight, work two days in a row (waaah!), then I'm off for a week. Freeeeeeeedom, indeed. A trip to Dave and Busters is being planned, and the Ground Zero that is my room requires federal aid of some sort, fo' serious.

This post was so cathartic. I need to do this more often.

Comments

[darker-one.livejournal.com]

Ewwww! As I've said before, just hearing about that kind of stuff over the phone from my clients grosses me out. But to have to deal with it in person... ew! You are a brave woman!