The girl writing this blog has slept during and through the night for the past 10 days, has eaten actual meals, and is feeling fantastic! This past week, I finished up my last job, helped move my family into a new house, enjoyed a beautiful holiday weekend complete with barbeques, frisbee golf, and biking, and started a new job. So far, there's no sign of slowing down.
This is a picture that I sneaked in during orientation today. We were getting fitted for respirators, so people came behind us and blew bitter gas into a little hole in the creepy cone of shame thing. If we tasted the gas, it meant the mask wasn't working and we needed a different kind. Felt like something you'd see go terribly wrong in a horror movie.
One of my last days at my old hospital, I had this very old patient. I'd walk in the room and ask if he needed anything. He'd look at me and shake his head. I'd ask him if he was in pain, and he'd nod. Once his meal tray came up, he put on the call light and I went in the room to help him. This is how the conversation went. "Come here. Sit me up. Bring that closer. Open that. Where's my salt? Put it in the soup. What's in there? Cover that back up. Give me my fork. Open the milk. Warm that up. That's all."
Because I try to be a nice person, I treated him kindly and with respect and dignity. However, it wasn't like I was rejoicing when I walked into the room. Then, at the end of shift, I walked in to give report to the next nurse. I walked in, the patient smiled at me and said, "There she is! That's my girl!" I was kind of taken aback.... If I had built up rapport with the patient throughout the day, I would have teased him or said something sassy. For this guy however, I didn't really know what to say cause I sure didn't think that I was 'his girl'. But you know what? I'll take it.
You guys, nurses have to have a twisted sense of humor. So much crazy happens that if we don't laugh about it, we will become depressed, cynical human beings. This story isn't really that funny, but this patient came in at 3:45 in the morning during one of my last night shifts. He had tons of what we'll call 'personality'. He was SO loud and SO blunt about his needs that my coworkers and I found ourselves laughing silently in the nurses station at nearly everything he said. The nurse asked him if he ever felt depressed and he announced "I feel happy ALL of the time". The nurse addressed him as Mr. ______ and he nearly shouted "You leave out the mister!" Then he made a crude joke. Then he started talking about the CT scan that he had received. He didn't know what it was called so he started trying to draw it in the air. As I'm writing this, I'm not laughing, but at the time, he could have passed as the winner of a stand up comedy show. My point is, give anyone who works midnights some slack. It's rough.
Orientation so far has been good. A lot of it is all the basic things that the hospital requires you to talk about, so it's a lot of lecture. The rest of this week is more orientation and then I have my first day on the floor next Monday!
More soon!
-C-
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