medicine

well the floor is a complete show right now, like BAD.  why?  two words: medicine overflow.  I'm talking weird aseptic meningitis/west nile, neutropenic cancer patients, every other room getting pumped full of blood products, grey people who don't look compatible with life, bad.  people who belong in the ICU, but can't go because they are not quite 75% dead yet, which is the threshold for admission through the pearly gates, bad.

SERIOUSLY.  it is easier to get into heaven than into the medical ICU.  ACTUAL HEAVEN.

i mentioned that i'm a trauma nurse, right?  so you can take your chronically ill medicine patients and SHOVE THEM.

things that don't interest me, a list:

• your fibromyalgia/chronic back pain that means that you either a. call me every 10 minutes for meds or b. spend the entire shift passed out in your bed with a half-eaten sandwich hanging from your mouth. 
• CHF.  seriously.  it is dead to me.  core measures?  dead. to. me.  
• toileting elderly people with UTIs.  over it.
• your 3020928345 meds for your 35 documented chronic conditions, and trying to figure out what your dialysis days are and where your access is and which of your limbs are missing and if you are blind or not and managing your 300s blood sugars.  not for me.
• syncope cardiac workups that obviously aren't cardiac and are actually just a waste of my time.
• arguing with you about your cardiac/renal/diabetic diet.  if it bothers you that much, go to the vending machine or have your family bring you chicken wings like everybody else does and leave me out of it.
• the "history of" isolations.  they inconvenience me.
• trying to locate your particular medicine doctor out of the 23490 medicine teams
• pointless labs for obscure antigens and swabbing every orifice for parasites and pertussis and AIDS, and then
• wondering if i have parasites/pertussis/AIDS from being exposed to you and your inevitable disgusting hacking cough you will cough right in my face.

in other words, i am not interested in medicine patients AT ALL.  which is why i became a surgical nurse.  so, unless your 80 year old with altered mental status also happened to get shot, kindly return her to the nearest medicine unit and send me someone with a suture line.  k thanks.