Monday, October 23, 2006

At least there wasn't any puke

I was thinking, as it was happening, that it was a bad day.
but I wasn't entirely sure.

it may have been the fact that I wanted to call in sick with GI distress.
it may have been when our boss told us she was having Thursday early (a "Thursday" is her equivalent of a Monday) and that if we really wanted something, NOT to ask her for it today.
it may have been when Dr. Rose* arrived for morning rounds and bite off an LPN's head in front of everyone. She didn't deserve to loose her head over her question to him.
(*i've decided to name him Dr. Rose because he's excellent with his patients, particularly the elderly and the palliative. But when we, the nurses, approach him, we tend to get the thorns)

or maybe it was when my patient's ambulance was rerouted for an accident in town and we were all on red-alert for the impending trauma. Which never came.

or when I had to give a blood transfusion to a patient (the last time I gave one I was yelled at the whole time by the patient who eventually just signed herself out of the hospital) who started having baby signs of a transfusion reaction.

or when I had a baby admitted into my care for seizure observation and I'd keep running down the hallway to see if he was still breathing.

it may have been when I felt like a dumbass for not giving the baby a medication I could have and not realizing until I was home that I actually had good reasons to not have given it but just hadn't documented them.
it may have been when the night nurse yelled at me for still having a seizing baby in our care and for having a seriously suicidal team in our hospital.
or when the other nightnurse yelled at me for not having called the night doctor to change my patient's diet.

I think it was when we learned that the trauma of the morning was a suicide...of a patient we had just sent home that day.
And then my coworker chastised me for not being sensitive enough to the night doctor who had been "responsible" for the suicide. (I later apologized to him, but he hadn't been offended. Which is good because there was no way he was responsible and if he thought he was, then he was a dumbass. I cant believe I apologized to a doctor. Of my own freewill.)

I was tired. And sick. And my coworkers were tired and sick. And the doctors were all on edge. And it was Monday. And we had exceeded our maximum patient allowance and still admitted patients to the extent that the computer (which broke down in the middle of the afternoon) wouldn't let us admit any more because we had 2 people in a one-bed room.
And I called Dr. Bushman because one of the LPNs needed a coumadin order and she couldn't find Dr. Rose and was scared to call Dr. Bushman. Not that I blamed her - she'd already had her head bitten off by Rose and Bushman is meaner than him. And Dr. Bushman and I had a strange conversation, as per usual. He said I must have had a nice vacation because I was all chipper. I told him I was actually frazzled but pretending to sound chipper so he'd be chipper back. And then I gave him the background on the patient and why I needed his help and told him I was ready for all his questions. He just laughed and told me to write down that Rose was unavailable, to put in brackets ASSHOLE! and then to write the coumadin order. I knew it was a bad day when I started laughing inappropriately at things, like Bushman calling Rose an asshole. And when i left work holding in my tears.

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