That'll teach me
So this morning, I wake up (reluctantly) at 5:30, and call the nursing supervisor to find out where she's putting me for the day. At this point in my day, what this translates into is, "Must I get up and get dressed? Or can I just roll over and go back to sleep?" Well, I must get up and get dressed, but she isn't sure what she is going to do with me. She was going to assign me to sit with a patient in the ED, but that patient just bailed. (Apparently they couldn't get a sitter for the overnight?) So she wasn't sure what I'd be doing yet, but thought I might possibly end up in "the unit."
Side note: we can't be a normal hospital, and have an ER and an ICU. No, we have an Emergency Department (ED) and Critical Care Unit (CCU) aka "the unit."
So we set a plan that I'll call when I get there and ask where to report, because by then, they should know what they are doing with me. I get off the phone, and start muttering about how I hope it is anything *but* the unit, because normally, when they send me there, I have little or nothing to do. The nurses aren't used to having a tech on to help, most of the time, and beat me to the q-2hr vitals and Foley checks. They do tend to use me to turn patients, but by definition there aren't a whole ton of patients in there, so this takes very little time, even needing to be done q-2. So here I am hoping to be almost anywhere else, because I find the unit *boring.*
Yeah, you can hear this coming, right?
This was the most insane day I have ever worked in there. They attached me to a floor nurse (aka a nurse who works on a regular floor) to try and help relieve the overflow in the ED by admitting a bunch of patients to the unit who don't need to be there. Why? Because there are no beds anywhere else. Even so, this sounds reasonably doable. Until the monitor tech gets a load of what kind of orders she needs to input to the computer. Yeesh. And they actually *had* their own PCT on, but needed to pull her to help with orders, so this meant any second I wasn't working with my floor nurse, I was getting grabbed by one of the others to turn this patient, clean that patient, get vitals, get finger sticks, run to the lab with specimens, run to the lab and pick up blood, help discharge two patients who have been downgraded from critical to make room for someone who just coded in the ED, and then get the rest of the non-critical patients out of the unit and onto floors where people have gotten discharged because, hey, they don't have enough nurses to deal with that many patients in the unit at night.
Note to patients: please check with your neighbors to find out when they are planning to have car accidents, strokes, surgical complications, sudden inexplicable paralysis, or whatever, so that you don't all go to the hospital at the same time. K?
I'm not complaining, really. I'm ecstatic to have the hours, and downright gleeful that my knees held up through the day. The knee supports are making me itchy, though. I wonder if I washed them in a weird soap the last time I packed them away or something, because I don't remember this being a problem before.
Side note: we can't be a normal hospital, and have an ER and an ICU. No, we have an Emergency Department (ED) and Critical Care Unit (CCU) aka "the unit."
So we set a plan that I'll call when I get there and ask where to report, because by then, they should know what they are doing with me. I get off the phone, and start muttering about how I hope it is anything *but* the unit, because normally, when they send me there, I have little or nothing to do. The nurses aren't used to having a tech on to help, most of the time, and beat me to the q-2hr vitals and Foley checks. They do tend to use me to turn patients, but by definition there aren't a whole ton of patients in there, so this takes very little time, even needing to be done q-2. So here I am hoping to be almost anywhere else, because I find the unit *boring.*
Yeah, you can hear this coming, right?
This was the most insane day I have ever worked in there. They attached me to a floor nurse (aka a nurse who works on a regular floor) to try and help relieve the overflow in the ED by admitting a bunch of patients to the unit who don't need to be there. Why? Because there are no beds anywhere else. Even so, this sounds reasonably doable. Until the monitor tech gets a load of what kind of orders she needs to input to the computer. Yeesh. And they actually *had* their own PCT on, but needed to pull her to help with orders, so this meant any second I wasn't working with my floor nurse, I was getting grabbed by one of the others to turn this patient, clean that patient, get vitals, get finger sticks, run to the lab with specimens, run to the lab and pick up blood, help discharge two patients who have been downgraded from critical to make room for someone who just coded in the ED, and then get the rest of the non-critical patients out of the unit and onto floors where people have gotten discharged because, hey, they don't have enough nurses to deal with that many patients in the unit at night.
Note to patients: please check with your neighbors to find out when they are planning to have car accidents, strokes, surgical complications, sudden inexplicable paralysis, or whatever, so that you don't all go to the hospital at the same time. K?
I'm not complaining, really. I'm ecstatic to have the hours, and downright gleeful that my knees held up through the day. The knee supports are making me itchy, though. I wonder if I washed them in a weird soap the last time I packed them away or something, because I don't remember this being a problem before.