A Christmas Nurse

Hey all! I've had lots of blog post ideas flying through my head lately but literally, absolutely not a single second to post.

Life has been....interesting? Confusing? Good? Different?

I think the "holiday season" is like that for everyone, and for a lot of people, the holiday season is different for everyone each year.

This year I've been feeling a little anti- Christmas-y and I'm not even sure why exactly. I just keep feeling that time is flying so fast, and why let myself get attached to the christmas season when it's over so fast? I think it has to do with the "I'm 23 phase and life is really starting to fly", which is, sad, because I know that feeling will only get worse with time... I also think I'm going through a phase where I'm trying to commit to things that will last...I get Christmas gets the short end of that stick this year? Next year will be different, I know it will.

Also, this Christmas was entirely different from the rest because it was my first Christmas on the job...being night shift, I worked Christmas eve into Christmas. I wasn't sure what to expect, but i sure learned a lot.

Nursing is a whole other ball game on the holidays. Like a complete idiot, I was assuming that our Christmas eve would be pleasant on the floor, as not many people like to be patients on the holidays, and not many doctors like to be doctors on the holidays.

So yes, we did have a low census. I had three patients, one admission. But the type of patients was different, in a big way.

Over the holidays, I find there are two types of main patients. At least two types I've encountered thus far.

Type one: being that no one likes to be a patient on Christmas when they should be home with their family, and no doctor wants to be rounding in the hospital when they could be home with their family, doctors I've found usually try and make an effort to discharge as many patients as they can, even if it's christmas eve, 4 pm. (my section discharged four on christmas eve!)

So, that being, the patients that re left, are the ones of high acuity status and cannot be sent home because they are just that sick. We, as nurses, don't treat these patients any different or fear their acuity status, because on a "normal" day we're used to having those patients in addition to five more.

Type two patient:

This Is where I learned the saddest lesson of all in nursing. Well, maybe not the saddest, but pretty high up there. Turns out, it's pretty common for stressed out caregivers of intense family members to "drop off" their family members in the ER a day or two before christmas, and say "they have been acting funny." This, in a way, forces the ER doctor to admit an elderly patient who has "been acting funny", to run some tests. When most of the time, the family member really just wanted a "break" for Christmas and enjoyed some alone time without being a caregiver, and there's nothing wrong with this patient.

Now we have a confused elderly lady with severe Alzheimer's, she's out of her usual habitat, and we're forced to run her through expensive tests and bolus her with IV fluids.

Now this all would be fun except this patient needs constant reorientation. She wants to pull her IV out ( that I successfully put in! YAY!!), and she is looking for her baby and thinks her mon and dad are upstairs looking for her. Awesome. Let me tell you now that when reading the ER admission assessment, it read, "family member reports patient was throwing remotes at people." Also, awesome.

The first night i had her, she was reorient-able, but she forgot everything we said within five minutes. By the time I came in for christmas eve, she was an official 1:1 visual observation, and she was not reorientable.

My shift starts at 7pm and by 9pm she was (literally) pushing my nurse aide doing the 1:1. She wanted to put the eggs from the store into the fridge. She wanted check on Jimmy. She wanted to go lock the front door, she wanted to go run to work and finish up.

I feel sorry for her, really, I do. But seriously? I tried reorienting her, i did that's what we're supposed to do. But by hour 5 of repeating myself and her behavior worsening, I tried a new rote of playing along. Yes, I locked the door. Well take care of the eggs in the morning. I checked on jimmy, he is all right. Your parents are okay, they said its time to go to bed. I did the dishes already. Work can wait til tomorrow. Is that so wrong to leave them under their illusion?


So I can't really say I blame her for wanting a break over christmas. She's a lot to take care of. But that's not the way to handle it. She needs to be in an Alzheimer's unit or nursing home, or have a 24/7 aide hired. Not an expensive hospital stay for no reason.

So, overall it was a fun night. Definitely not an "easy" night as I was so foolishly expecting. But, that's part of nursing.

So, lesson learned: never anticipate an easy night in nursing. Everrrrrr.



This next week I'll be quiet- I work three nights then flying out of town and won't have much blogging time. But I hope to post for new years. :-)


Goodnight all! ~ WNB




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The Unsurpassable amounts of snow blog, as promised...(with PICTURES!)

Have you ever shovelled snow as tall as you? (well, almost?) Because I can now proudly add that to my resume.  Unfortunately most companies won't really give a flying fudgestick. Anyway, my family decided to continue on with our annual Long Island trip this year to celebrate Christmas with my grandmother and uncle. Despite the snow forecast (A bajillion feet of snow is coming. To Long Island.) So we drove up (across?) to Long Island on Christmas day and settled in, and watched the snow start to fall early the next day. It was a great day. We played board games, drank a boatload (thats a lot) of tea, cooked fun things like STUFFING (I love stuffing) and potatoes, and meat and stuff like that. Occasionally we looked outside and thought, aw, how pretty. Or, "ooh, wow, it certainly is windy, isn't it?" I would occasionally ask a friend at home, "Hey, hows the snow there?" To only get a minimal response of "Not much...an inch maybe?" Which led me to make the face of...."o_0" aka (That's lame.) Little did I know...


SO, the next morning we all woke up and were all like WOW LOOK AT ALL THIS SNOW. To better illustrate the magnitude of HAPPY snow, here is a picture:

Notice you can't see the street that I so kindly pointed out for you. ALSO NOTICE the TWO FEET of snow that you see on the bush in front of you. But, at that moment in the day, I was elated to see two feet  of snow in front of me, because hey, I hadn't seen my good friend snow yet this year, and I was happy to see two feet's worth of my good friend, snow on our first meeting together. We had breakfast and it was jolly. We sang happy songs and did happy dances because of all the snow and made adventurous plans to go be jolly in the snow and make snow angels and jump in it and cause massive amounts of frostbite. It wasn't until I heard the following sentence, pointed in my direction, that I started to wonder how good of friends me and snow actually were: "Were going to have such a fun time shovelling..."

At first, I was all like YEAH! Dude, I get a workout! This is awesome because I forgot my wii workout program at home and this could be my pseudo-workout! DUDE I'm going to be BUFF. So we (my dad and I) suited up and we trekked outside to shovel. It was still two feet (unfortunately none had melted)...and the snowblower was deemed not-usable. So everything was going great. I was shovelling the walkway and my Dad was digging our van out. It wasn't until I turned the corner, to approach the driveway, that I realized snow and I were not friends anymore.

I forgot, or maybe failed to realize that because it was so windy, snow drifts. Yes, isn't that nice? So, even though we got 2 feet of snow which was a lot to begin with, that tip of drift you see on the left there is approximately 4'8".  K? Folks, I am not used to this. I do not live, nor do I ever plan to, live in Wisconsin. (Thats the only place I can think of that gets a lot of snow. I'm sure there are other places. Like, Long Island for instance.) I'd also like to mention that snow drifts really don't care about your well being, and like to taunt you and there is probably a wind-snow god laughing ridiculously as I stood there, looking at the unsurpassable amount of snow ahead of me. Snow drifts are not fair because, the neighbor got like, 2 inches of snow. Approximately. Because it all ended up on our driveway.

o_0.

So I'm not going to bore you with the shovelling details. It was hard. There was a lot of grunting (mostly by me) and my dad thought I had suddenly turned Chinese, or was playing tennis or something because I suddenly thought that if I could make a really annoying sound each time I lifted a shovelfull of snow, that maybe, just maybe, it would be easier to lift.

But we did it. It took us five hours to make a pathway to my grandma's car, and we almost gave up, many times. But we persevered. I went inside and hid underneath my covers with a cup of tea.

BUT THEN. OH, THERE IS MORE. IT GETS BETTER.

Two days later, after the roads were deemed passable and driveable on, we decided it was time to head home. It wasn't until we were about halfway home, did we realize that even though our humble town in NJ only got 3-4 inches, that our driveway was most likely going to be a sheet of 3-4 inches of snow and ice. And its uphill too, I'd like to add.

We had high hopes for something different. Such as:
"Well maybe it melted." or.."Maybe one of our neighbors plowed it"...or, "maybe our neighborhood didn't get any snow..magically"

neither of those high hopes happened.
Instead, we pulled up to our driveway and my dad was all like:

"I think we can get up. It doesnt look that deep."
Mom was all like, "I don't think we can".
Dad: "I dont care. Lets try it."

So we tried it. It was going really well until we stopped exactly halfway up, and heard the wheels spinning and the van was officially not moving. In retrospect, I am very mad I did not get out and take a picture for the sole purpose of blogging, so instead I drew a picture:

So thats how it all went down. In case you are from Mexico or somewhere where snow NEVER happens EVER, snow is NOT in fact Purple. It is white. However, you try and DRAW snow. White snow. On a white background. So I made it purple for the day.

So we got out, got our bare essentials and trekked into the house. We went back out. And shovelled. We dug out van out first, which was very difficult because the tires had pounded the snow into the blacktop, making a lovely sheet of snow/ice which is not shovel-friendly.

So thats my story of the blizzard of 2010. In long island. It was epic.

Needless to say though, me and snow have still not made up. we are still not friends. It will have to take a lot of work to rebuild that friendship. Maybe, one day.

~ A Writer in a Nurse's Body

EDIT:

my spell checker keeps telling me Unsurpassable is not a word that it recognizes. However I refuse to change it because I like it and I think it describes the amount of snow that we faced. Sorry for the possible confusion.

Apologizations

I am currently lacking blogging mo-jo because I am so overcome with fascination and laughter because I have recently discovered the awesome-ness of Allie Brosh. And her blog. See link below.

In fact, it is so funny, that I have become completely obsessed with this blog. I have started thinking of funny situations in life and how they would make perfect blogs in her blog, but not mine. Because she is brilliant and hilarious. I visualize funny situations happening in my life, with her little pink dress and blond pigtails and evil red eyes. So funny. I have even laughed-OUT-LOUD...MANY times...to this blog, and that is a rare occasion.

Oh, believe me. I have tried to write my own blog posts over the last two days. But every topic that I come up with seems infinitesimal and pointless in comparison to the awesomeness that is hyperboleandahalf. But, I do have a big post coming on New Years eve AND New years day, and I may post a blog later tonight or tomorrow about the unsurpassable amounts of SNOW we got. But, now I feel better explaining why my blog has been MIA. Also because its Christmas and Ive been spending time with my family. But more so because I have been too busy laughing. Check out her blog:

http://www.hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/

so. funny.

~WNB

Merry Christmas to All....

Merry Christmas to All....

Merry Christmas to those who labor this night on behalf of others: nurses and doctors, police officers and firefighters, gas station attendants, pilots and taxi drivers and all those whose work prevents them from sharing this evening with those they love. Thank you.

Merry Christmas to all soldiers that are serving their country tonight instead of warm and at home with their family. Thank you, U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Navy. Thank you for keeping us safe tonight.

Merry Christmas to all those that all ill or are in grief- may bright days find you soon. <3

And, for my good friend who may or may not read this, Merry Christmas to all Disney Cast Members! Thank you for giving us all joy, and spending your Christmas giving joy to others in the parks!

And since I know I have many out-of-country readers,

Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Joyeux Noel, Kala Christouyenna!, Buone Feste Natalizie, Sawadee Pee Mai, Feliz Natal, Linksmu Kaledu...just to name a few.


And from my lovely Christmas service:

<3

...And to all, a Goodnight!

~A Writer in a Nurse's Body