I’m leaving January 14th for Vietnam!
I do most of my reading at night just before turning out the light. The Exorcist is best read while alone and undisturbed. It is even better if your house makes a lot of random, unexplained noises. I’m all about the atmosphere.
A movie star comes to believe that her young daughter Reagan is possessed. A young priest, battling his own demons of guilt and doubt, is called upon to help. An old priest arrives to face his ancient enemy one more time.
The story is ultimately about faith. The mother is an athiest. The old priest has complete faith. My favorite character was that of Damien Karras, the younger Jesuit priest and psychiatrist. Damien struggles between faith and doubt, and he seeks proof one way or another.
The detective investigating a death that occurred in the house is perhaps one of the most irritating characters of any book I’ve read. There would have to be some reference to an investigation into the possibility of foul play, but I could have done without his presence. His gimmick was acting dumb in order to catch someone off guard with a sharp question. It got old, and I kept wishing one of the other characters would call him on it.
The strange activity and behaviors are treated without fanfare. It simply is. That simplicity is what makes the situations more disturbing. Obviously there is something very wrong with Reagan. The situations only worsen as doctor after doctor can offer no answer. The mother is at a breaking point as she is both concerned for her daughter and terrified by the “Reagan-thing.” This desperation leads her to beg for an exorcism.
In the end Father Karras finds his answers and perhaps even his purpose. He is the only character in whom the reader can see a definitive change. The others are left without any neat resolutions. They have only questions.
Cindy called me last night and asked if we could move our trip to Vietnam from June to January. As in next month. She wants to attend a wedding January 15th.
She also wants to add Singapore and South Korea to our itinerary.
I’m. So. There.
Yesterday was not one of those days that makes me reconnect with the joy of nursing.
I had two psych patients. One was nice if a little teary, but that was nothing that her meds and some listening didn’t solve. The other woman was infuriating to deal with, and this most mostly due to her enabling family.
When I came in to introduce myself that morning, the husband actually turned to the patient and asked, “Do you like her, honey?” At the moment the woman was being examined due to these stange “fainting” spells she was having. Spells that would immediately follow a moment in which she was told by someone that she couldn’t go home right then. Spells in which she would be standing next to me and then go limp and throw her head back all the while holding herself up straight. She displayed a flat affect and wouldn’t look at anyone in the eye… until her baby grandson shows up. Then she’s all coos and smiles and playful. She will refuse everything (meds, imaging,etc) and then complain that people treat her badly when all she does is do what we tell her to do. She was upset at being cajoled by family into taking her meds, so she starts moaning and groaning and complaining that she’s sick to her stomach. I bring her Reglan. The moaning and groaning doesn’t stop until she eats a snack that family bring her. It was a long, long day.
The topping came right at the end of the shift. My aide (who is all kinds of awesome) came to the station looking for me. Apparently the family was upset at her and claimed she never brought a dinner tray. My aide says she walked in with a tray. The patient refused, so she walked back out with it. I believe my aide. I don’t get how the husband is still believing what his wife is saying after spending the entire day witnessing her lies to both him and me.
I didn’t get the chance to say that to him. I walked in the room and told the husband I had called dietary and asked them to send another tray. This sent him into little fury. “Another tray! Ma’am, there was never a first tray. I’ve never left the room, so I would know.” Our dinner trays come earlier than most expect, sir. Are you sure you never left the room between 4:15 and 4:45? Stammer, stammer, stammer. Ok, then. Dietary confirmed to me that they will be sending up a tray. My pager started beeping, or I probably would have gone into it a bit more.
In the midst of the tray fury, I received a transfer from a medical floor. My report: young man, recently extubated after being in ICU for worsening pneumonia, got up with PT and experienced sob and chest pain, sustained sinus tach 140s-150s,50% non-rebreather with sats in low 90s and dropping when off O2. There are no other orders in my chart aside from the transfer order to telemetry.
I walk into the room and find a nice young man and family. The young guy is still wearing the mask he was wearing in ICU even though he sats fine without it. He says he never experienced any shortness of breath or other symptoms. He says that PT checked his 02 without the mask during the “incident” and he was satting 92-95% then. Current heart rate 90-105. He ambulates and voids. He gets very anxious at times, more so when staff is working with him. This is stated by the family and confirmed by the patient. Family says they tried to tell the nurses this, but no one listened.
He looked nothing like the hurried report I received. He transferred to me a couple of hours after this “incident.” The order could have been cancelled. Not a case for telemetry.
*radio playing top 40*
Client: Why aren’t you playing Christmas music?
Stylist: We were before. I guess someone didn’t like it.
Client: Well, there’s only one reason why someone wouldn’t like Christmas music. Someone doesn’t love Jesus.
I’ve gotten close with Cindy, one of the new nurses at the hospital. I was her preceptor, and she even stayed at my house a few times a week for a couple of months until her own semipermanent arrangement was arranged. (Her commute is nearly two hours, so her plan was to stay in town with another new nurse and friend from school. Her friend didn’t move into her apartment until two months after Cindy started working.)
Cindy is making plans to go back to Vietnam next summer, and she invited me to come with her and stay with her family. Ummmm… yes! Not only am I going to Vietnam, but Cindy and her husband will be having the wedding ceremony, parties, and pictures taken that they were unable to do a few years ago. And I get to participate. I’m so excited already. Cindy is inviting another friend to come along, and I hope she can make it, too.
We may even extend the trip and visit a few other countries while we’re at it.
How am I supposed to wait until June?
I’ve been in quite a funk lately about my job. I hate it more and more each day. On rare occasions I get pulled to med-surg or even the neuro floor, and I can’t get over how calm and relaxed these floors feel compared to my own. No Exedrin Migraine needed those days, but there are no openings on those floors for now. Any other job I look to outside of the hospital is not likely to match my current salary.
I’m soon approaching my two-year anniversary to nursing. I’m trying to decide what to do next. My original plan was to stick it out. The nurses on my floor say “if you can work here you can work anywhere.” I was going to stay in telemetry and go back to school part-time to be a nurse practitioner. I’m just not even sure about that anymore.
These feelings have gotten exponentially worse the last couple of months, so at first I thought that I was being affected by the seasonal changes. I hate the dark. I hate the cold.
Deep down I know that, while the feelings may have worsened due to the season, those feelings have been there for a least a year now. So, what to do? What to do?
Nurse Manager popped by the station. “Food’s here!” she exclaims as the food cart rolls by. Thanks, Captain Obvious! “Well?” she asks.
I’m on the phone with radiology, the other nurses are down the hall in patient rooms, and Charge Nurse is on the phone with staffing. The aides have taken the cart and are pushing it down the hall to begin passing trays. Charge Nurse hangs up. “What?”
Nurse Manager shakes her ponytail. “Food’s here! Let’s all go help pass the trays. Food is one of our problem areas in the patient surveys.”
“What are we supposed to do about the food?”
“No, silly. The food will get cold if you don’t go help pass it. That’s what the patients complain about.”
“Go touch a carrot.”
“What?”
“Touch a carrot now!” Nurse Manger looks confused.
“The food is already cold. What are we supposed to do about that? Unless you want us to micro-”
I clear my throat loudly to interrupt. “Do not give her any ideas!”
Questions from Apartment #412…
1. What do you do?
I’m a nurse at a small-ish hospital. I coordinate patient care between the various departments: physical therapy, respiratory, pharmacy, imaging,etc. The rest of my time is divided between paperwork and actual bedside care. I’ve been there two years, and the paperwork only continues to grow exponentially.
2. Do you enjoy it?
To be completely honest, not so much. There are those moments when I feel as though I made a difference in someone’s life, but they are so few and far between as to not be worth the extra stress the job has brought into my life. I keep Exedrin Migraine in my locker. My feet ache so that I can’t even wear my pretty shoes. The idiocy of upper management is mind boggling; patient safety seems to fall lower and lower on their list of priorities while the key word “patient satisfaction” grows in power. And I’m not a people person. I knew that going in. I’m good at it (I rock in receiving positive comments in patient surveys), but it’s exhausting to be forced to interact positively with so many people all the time. Especially when much of the time the patient is a whiny, needy little punk who can do more for himself than he pretends. (And yes, it usually is a male.) What the hell was I thinking?
3. If you could switch paths or fields – what would you choose instead?
My answer is probably the same as many: something creative. I like to knit. Maybe if I spent more time improving my skills, I could eventually write patterns. (I’ve sold one before.) I like to write. Maybe if I improved my skills, I could eventually write professionally. Ultimately, my ideal job would be to follow through on a brilliant idea that would eventually do most of the work for me. I like to sit with my brother and come up with random get-rich-quick ideas. Most are idiotic or are complicated to start-up, but you never know when you’ll stumble on a simple yet financially viable idea. Why, oh why didn’t I think up the Snuggie?
Yeah, I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. Why do you ask?
I’ll never understand why stupid policies get put into place that are obviously dangerous and/or make no sense. Well, I understand why a person far removed from bedside care might do so if it saved a few dollars. This is not the case.
I work on a telemetry unit, one of four telemetry units on a single floor. In the past, a person who went for a cath returned to their previous room unless they required more intensive care for whatever reason. I would send my patient to cath lab, and they would return to me a few hours later.
The powers that be have decided that any person who goes to cath lab and receives an intervention will afterwards be moved to one of the units. If they do not receive an intervention, they return to their previous room. There was a vague explanation about the patients being monitored more closely by a specially trained unit.
Bullshit. Whether or not a person receives an intervention, the care following the procedure is the same. Patient returns flat with extremity straight for the ordered amount of time. Vitals taken frequently and site monitored closely. Pressure held if hematoma occurs. Repeat.
This change would only make sense if they changed the criteria from just receiving an intervention to having the person transferred to a specialty unit if a sheath was still in place and must be pulled on the floor hours later. (Everyone on a telemetry unit is trained to do so.) That is when the patient is most at risk.
Instead, what happens is what happened to that poor unit tonight. The cath lab closes at 5-6ish. Every patient is transferred to them. They receive 6 at once. Many of them still with sheaths as cath lab does not hang around to pull the sheaths for late cases. All require close monitoring for the next several hours… at least. This is just asking for trouble.
Why do we always have to wait for the sentinel event?
P.S. Now that I think about it, is this a yearly ritual on this hospital’s telemetry floor?
