She Works Hard for the Money

Oh. My. Goodness.  Boy, I sure earned my pay last night!

I haven't had a shift like last night's in ages and I fully deserved my Au Bon Pn blueberry muffin I treated myself to on the way out of the hospital this morning and if anyone questions my overtime, I have no problem telling them about my night!

Song of the day - Donna Summers, 'She Works Hard for the Money.'

The night was off the wall nuts.  I started out ok with four patients (one of which was an admission from the emergency room that rolled up to the floor at 7:35, just 5 minutes after my shift started - gotta love it, nothing like starting a shift off with an admission before you even start getting report on your other patients).  Thankfully he wasn't too bad other than some frequent IV pain meds, but I also had a crazy paranoid schizophrenic and a young quadriplegic who was having trouble and a lady who kept asking me about her oxygen.  I had everything under control for the most part until the real fun started at midnight when I picked up a 5th patient who had been on the floor for less than an hour and was received from a psych hospital.

He has a long psych history which includes flight of ideas.  I asked him about pain and he started telling me about his toaster and suitcase.  Huh????  His heart rate and rhythm were out of control and his doctor kept entering order after order and then called me to ask what I thought about it.  I wanted to tell him, "you ordered it, if I had a problem with the order I would ask you about it.  Stop entering order after order and make me sign of on each one individually!  Gather your thoughts and enter them all at once so I can stop wasting my time and sign them off all at once!"  Also, if he had been trying to teach me something by asking my opinion to see my thought process, I would have been ok with that, but in all honesty, I don't know that he really knew what he was doing, which made me a little nervous because he was asking me about medications and IV drips that I have never had to initiate or push before).  All in all, I think I probably spent a total of 5 or 6 hours in that patient's room trying to figure out the mess of so many orders, his meds and what drips he wanted started and trying to get IV access and lab draws, and blood cultures.  That's a lot of time when you have 4 other patients who need you too.

I don't know if that makes much sense.  My other current problem is that I finally got in bed at 10am and was wide awake by 1:15pm.  This does not bode well for this post which turned into much more of a rant than I intended it to be or for tonight- which, fingers crossed, will be better than last night!