so it's nurses week and i'm bombarded with all the flowery, happy words and sentimental thoughts about healing and it makes me want to throw up a little. then you dig a little deeper, and you reach all the jokey ecards about sponge baths and stealing narcs. can nobody come up with something honest? because i can tell you exactly what nursing is, as illustrated by my night saturday:
so while everybody else in the world got to go out this weekend and wear fancy party hats and watch the kentucky derby and/or drink margaritas and celebrate cinco de mayo, i spent all of saturday getting screwed over, as usual.
we had eleven admits. ELEVEN.
everyone was in pain. or just dramatic. anxious. crying. generally needy.
i get the morbidly obese man with the enormous leg tumor...we're talking toddler-sized here, people. NOTHING would go right with him. his PICC from the outside hospital wouldn't draw, and it took me 15 minutes of pulling to get a syringe of blood. then lab called to say that everything was clotted and needed to be redrawn. kill myself. his large tumor smells and is leaking all over everything. i had to roll him like 6 times to adjust his sheets and put him on the bedpan and so the doctors could see the back of his giant tumor. and before i even had his admission done, the next one had arrived.
who was in uncontrolled pain. who broke both arms. who arrived to the floor 30 minutes before night shift starts and therefore i was expected to do all admission paperwork and charting and then go buy a FREAKING BOW AND PUT IT ON TOP OF HER HEAD.
and then there was my drama king patient with the rib fractures. seriously? i rubbed his back and listened to him discuss all his fee fees and murmured soothing words and put up with his histrionic crap all night. pity=gone. if you don't want to be in pain, maybe you should stop refusing everything i offer you because "that will make me throw up and i can't throw up with these riiiiiiiiibs". sir, you do not have stomach problems, YOU HAVE MENTAL PROBLEMS. now take your damn vicodin and leave me alone.
and while we're at it, i'm sorry that your 0.5 mg of xanax isn't as good as the 3 mg that you take at home. i know you are anxious and angry that none of your friends came to visit you. perhaps you should make your way down to the other end of the hall and sit with my other patient with borderline personality disorder. he, too, would like someone to sit in his room and "just talk". while you're at it, he would like someone to rub his back. so get on that.
and, for the record, we got not as much as a cheap pen set/gross cake for nurses day yesterday. as always, the appreciation from management is awe-inspiring. but not to worry because, as always, my love of bending over backwards for people and running my butt off night after night (with little gratitude and no thanks whatsoever) keeps me warm at night.
THIS is what nursing is:
it's doing 3 things at once while knowing that you're so far behind you'll probably be sitting for an hour after your shift catching up on charting.
it's driving home at night kicking yourself because you forgot to chart that PO intake, or forget to double check your I&Os, or didn't look at the 2000 vitals.
it's simultaneously doing a huge dressing change and fielding phone calls about staffing and placing new admits.
it's your phone ringing 4 times when you're in a patient's room with people calling about beeping pumps and patients who need pain meds.
it's calling a doctor, waiting 15 minutes for them to return a page, and then having them call back the second you go to the bathroom.
it's sitting at the nurses station trying to chart and not being able to because the call light goes off every 30 seconds and family members are continuously coming up to the desk for refills on water and to get more blankets.
it's like being a mother of 4 toddlers, all who depend on your for their every need. it is a job where people will bleed you dry then demand more. and there is ALWAYS something more you can do: another committee to join, another responsibility to pick up on the unit. and instead of recognizing that this is an impossible job and congratulating you on being able to do remotely what you need to, management will take all possible opportunities to tell you what you're NOT doing.
nursing is HARD, but people have no idea why. most days, it's not that i have to do gross things. or that my patient's stories make me really sad. it's that the system is broken. people take no responsibility for their own health. patients are often rude and entitled. and it's just so FRUSTRATING. i have spent the better part of the last four years completely frustrated.
so hallmark, why don't you make me a card about THAT.
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