Nasty nurse

So, it's only been like 6 years since I updated this thing. Does anybody even read blogs anymore?

 Anyhoo, here we are 6 yrs later and I'm still in the ER. I moved across the country and had plans to find a nice sweet job to slide into retirement with. No such luck. The unions in the city I settled in make it hard to get into jobs here-unless you want to work in the bowels of the hospital. I got hired within days of getting here. Should have know what  I was in for. Forty years of nursing and I'm 3 hours into my first day on the floor with the nastiest nurse of all time. First words out of her mouth are what are you doing? Um, I'm logging in and signing up for my patients. NO! Don't you know the first thing an ER nurse does? She stocks her IV cart and cleans her rooms. Get to it. Off  I trot to stock my cart and when I come back she says did you do this, this and this? Um, no I just got done stocking. After rolling her eyes and sighing I'm thinking I'm going to leave and never come back at this point. There's more, much more on how she treated me. For no good reason.

 Here I am one year later in this country club of an ER. I held my head high and completely didn't feed into their bullying initation process that they put everybody through. Amazingly enough, this place has a bigger turnover than McDonald's. Why do nurses do this to each other? My old non- union hospital in a part of the country with no unions would have fired nasty nurse for her behavior. I didn't complain because I needed the job and needed to be there 6 months until my job was protected.

 To say this late in my careeer that is was one of the worse things to happen to me in nursing would be an understatement.  I would have thought this strong group of union nurses would support each other, be each other's cheerleader. Maybe it's just the dysfunction of this particular ER. Doesn't matter. I'm vested. I'll tell you though, she messes me with me I'm taking it through the channels, I'll make a formal complaint let HR deal with the union over her. I'm old, I can retire, and would make it my mission to see she doesn't do this to anybody ever again.

A slow death

We have been slowly decreasing triage out front. Days past we could have up to three nurses out front but not anymore. Now days we have one sitting at the desk with two techs who run patients back. The nurse out front types the chief complaint in and places them in a bed in the back. Rarely are they triaged out front anymore. So, our illustrious Dr. Silverfox has made comments that he would like to completely close triage in the near future.

One day a few weeks ago one of the charges decided to not even recept the patients coming in the door. Just grab them and place them in any available bed. The nurse in the back was now responsible for recepting and then triaging the patient. It makes the door to bed time almost nil but is it safe?

If I'm in a cardiac room and 2 or 3 patients show up in my other rooms I won't know it because they aren't on the tracker yet. Of course nobody tells you they just placed patients in your rooms, you're suppose to know this by freaking osmosis I suppose. Of course we still have 3 or 4 charge nurses on who are sitting at the desk with their feet up and surfing the net.

The door to bed thing has gotten out of control. Of course all the upper management types are getting big bonuses and visits from the corporate hacks praising them for their great wait times.

FML.

Huge Fail

After following this case for the past 3 years, I'm disappointed to say the least in the verdict.

Where is common sense? The jury seems to have wanted all the high tech stuff like on TV programs. I'm betting they were expecting a video of Casey killing Caylee and walking into the woods with her little body. Who knows! Whatever it is that these 12 jurors were thinking it's obvious they felt that there was no evidence to prove that Casey killed her child.

Really?

I wonder who they think it is that threw this baby out like garbage? Who was driving the car that smelled like a dead body had been in it? Who partied like a rock star for 31 days after her child disappeared? Who was the pathological liar and thief in this case? Oops, her mom lied about being at work. Oops, her dad lied about an affair with some floozy.

Reasonable doubt. You can't doubt the jury on this one. Even though we as the public know a lot more about this case than they did, I'm still having a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact they didn't find her guilty on a lesser charge.

Party on, Casey. Bitch.

For What It's Worth

So, I get a text message last week from one of my co-workers that stated “Guess who they are training for relief charge?” Uh, IDK? When she texts me back all I could do was respond with LMAO, HAHAHA!

I had been off a few days and when I came back it was the talk of the department. People were pulling me into the hall closet to tell me they were going to HR and calling corporate compliance and all sorts of foolishness. Some had already spruced up their resumes and sent them out. Me, I was annoyed at the choice but after a gazillion years in nursing not surprised at all.

They picked Nurse Nasal Whiny Voice, a nurse a total of maybe 3 years. I think they must have been smoking crack or something because this 'thing' is a silly little girl. She’s always out by the ambulances hanging with the boys, or sitting at the desk slamming a new orientee and basically just being a worthless co-worker. She’s complained about everything under the sun you can imagine and has called in sick more times than I have in 20 years. She's the first to know any gossip going around and let's you know it. WTF were they thinking?

Me and my friend Double D were sitting in the shit area in the back last weekend, which some think is punishment but we think it’s great. We have our own little desk and mostly get LOL’s from nursing homes and minor stuff. We chit-chat all day long while we work and basically it’s real smooth. Nobody ever comes back there, let alone any charge nurse to see how things are going.

Around the corner comes Whiny asking us with her new super management authority type voice if we’re doing okay and is there anything she can do for us? Well ya'll know I’m old and hard of hearing so I totally kept doing what I was doing and so did Double D who is also hard of hearing. When we didn’t respond, she looked at us and repeated herself in a much louder and whinier nasal voice. I looked up slowly and told her we were fine and carried on as if she had never walked by.

We found out later she went up to the real charge nurse and said we were sitting on patients, loud and whiny enough for half the nurses station to hear. Of course, half the nurses station came and told us. That was fun, it was good times.

More to be revealed, I'm sure.

Doctor Medic

I'm sure all ED's have one of these, the paramedic who thinks he is a doctor. Thinks he is the team leader in a critical situation because he works at the big house downtown and flies on the helicopter and shit.

Case in point: We get a full code from the jail, found down and non-responsive. Even thought the auto pulse is on, he's in ankle cuffs and one arm is cuffed. I walked in to help because my rooms were full of boring crap and I like to look at young, buff cop types. Yep, breaks up the day.

In comes the sweet doctor with 5 kids who looks 16. She's so way over the top cool, I could only hope to be her. Right away Dr. Medic starts telling her we gotta get this King tube out, we gotta get an EJ line going, directs a younger less experienced nurse to pull up some Epi (given 1 min prior while unloading) and generally just turns the room into chaos. I left the room to sit at the desk and watch the very fine behinds of the cops at this point.

Dude ending up being a huge head bleed and the king tube was the least of his problems.

Another day, family pulls up to triage with a lady in the car who they say isn't breathing right. Um, no she is in full arrest. We pull her out, toss her onto a stretcher and tube her right there. CPR continues off and on for a while, getting a pulse back at times. Super Dr. Medic keeps checking in the room to see if I have my drips maxed out. Ummhmm. Big Doctor B comes in and says lets just try some Vasopressin. Granted, the codes been off and on for 30 minutes. Whatever. It's almost time for me to leave and whatever gets me though to 7P with an alive patient is good for me. But oh no! Dr. Medic starts in with Big Dr. B on protocols and what the studies have shown on giving Vasopressin this late in the game. Oops, too late, I already had slammed it in. Big Dr. B is super passive-aggressive and just kept nodding at Dr. Medic. All was good, I left the place not having to deal with the princess on the night shift who wants it all wrapped up with a bow for her.

I wouldn't care all so much if Dr. Medic would just do the skut work once in a while. You know, like do an EKG for me, put the IV in and take the patient to CT on a monitor. It would also be nice if he'd shut his pie hole about how great he is and how many lives he saved being so wonderful and all.

Fibro My Ass

I would rather chew on tin foil than to have another fibromyalgia patient to deal with.

Thus, I went shopping last week for a cute pair of sandals with a decent heel to wear with jeans. I walk into the store and eye the Dansko section, which has a whole bunch of really cute shoes. I pick out a couple of pairs and sit down to try on, when the sales guy tells me, "I've sold 20 pairs of these in the past two weeks to women with fibromyalgia."

My head suddenly started to spin. There was no way I was buying anything from this smirking little fucker in his 20's.

I then went home and ordered the shoes from Zappos.

Hood Time

So I felt like I was working in the hood a few weeks ago. We aren't a trauma center, so when one does come in it's through the front door.

As fate would have it, I was out in triage minding my own business with the coughs, colds, flu symptoms and flank pain. I hear some yelling, and turn to see this really skinny chick wearing daisy dukes grabbing a wheelchair and shrieking that she's bringing a head injury in. Okay, but where is the car? Oh, my bad, I'm not up on the hood ways anymore. She's parked way across the parking lot where we see her and a gentleman tossing a dude into the chair. She runs across the parking lot with the patient bouncing all over the place.

After parking him in front of me, she states she doesn't know him, that he was working on her roof and something heavy fell on his head. The fact that half his skull looks fractured and the right side of his face and head are swelling in front of my eyes causes me to pause. He can barely eek out his name and off we go to our equivalent of a critical room.

Of course he gets choppered out with 10 skull fractures, 2 sub-arachnoid bleeds, a sub-dural hematoma and a drug screen that lit up the evening sky.

So, all you real hood nurses, do you really think something fell on his head?

Like, hahahahahaha.