Special

work started out well, for a Monday.
they gave me the whole medical side - 4 patients, but a student had one of them. That left me with:
a patient with dementia
one with hyponatremia (essentially water intoxication)
and a cardiac.

here's a secret:

CARDIACS SCARE ME.

i made the mistake of telling my coworkers that today.
words spoken at work have a tendency to make things happen.
today, my saying Cardiacs scare me caused me to get a new admission - ANOTHER CARDIAC!
this one was in atrial fib. and was on this crazy diltiazem drip. which the ER nurse was going to start for me until the ambulance called to say they were bringing in an Overdose so the nurse handed me a pile of bottles of drugs and the stretcher with my patient and that was that.
luckily, the Surgical nurse said she'd help me since she's a senior nurse and i'm a junior nurse.
Halfway through she confessed that she had never done one either!
the patient said she felt fine but her blood pressure was awful. very low. with a negligeable difference between the systolic and the diastolic. and her heartrate was still over 140.
so i had to stand there and watch her and take her BP every 15mins and i couldnt stop yawning and the heart monitor of the other cardiac, her roomate, kept going off and i kept having to yell at her to QUIT MOVING (it was making her heartrate go to 160) and NO YOUR HUSBAND CANT BRING YOU CHINESE FOOD.
finally, i pulled in a spare table and chair and made myself comfortable to do some charting and monitor them closely.
except for when i had to keep runing down to the ER to talk to the doctor about the crazy drip and BP.
Because her BP was so low and we had to keep watching her and the BP machine wouldnt work properly, we decided, the Surgical nurse and myself, that we should move my patient into room 11. Sure, yea, that's the best thing, i agreed.
So we moved her in and put her on a heart monitor with an automatic BP machine (sweet!) and i sat down to chart and observe and call the doctor because she wasnt peeing and her lungs were getting crackly (meaning all the fluid was building up in her lungs and other tissues instead of in her bladder) and suddenly i realized that i was a Special (a 1-to-1 nurse).
I had been Specialing her all afternoon.
And as we had moved to room 11, i was now....

THE ICU NURSE!

And it wasnt scary any more. Because i just did it. I didnt have time to think about it. Or about not doing it.