Well, I had the opportunity to stay home today and BOY was I tempted! However, today I had a new student starting with me. She will work with me for about six weeks, and I didn't think that would be quite fair to have her try and find someone else on her first day!
"Bad" sign number one...three patients went to the surgery/PICU between 6 and 7 AM...not a good way to end the shift, or a great way to start one. Then, we started off the day with one patient, which is never really a good thing since that means admission #1 (and maybe #3 or 4 or 5) came to me. Luckily our one patient was very self-sufficient because she was "neglected" for much of the 3 1/2 hours our first admission was on the floor. He ended up getting a temperature close to 105 degrees with a heart rate over 200 and we no longer could get a blood pressure with the machine...to the PICU he went. That was a pretty intense couple of hours, but there was a LOT of teamwork going on which was AWESOME! :o)
So, that left me with one patient yet again. I ate lunch and got ready for "round two". My next admission was getting admitted for transplant. This usually involves a mad rush to get all the labs and tests done, sometimes with the patient going to surgery very quickly. So, another intense hour or so trying to make sure everything was done in a timely manner. Of course, this happen to coincide with the time I needed to do some important things with my other patient (the one "nurse thing" I had to do with her all day and I was LATE...I was SO annoyed!). To make matters worse, I was slowed down by a nurse who decided she needed to learn about the process of admitting a child pre-transplant...NOT when I'm on a time crunch please!... Learning is very good, but there is a time and place for that, and this was not a good time! In the end, everything that needed to get done got done, but it was a little stressful at times.
Did I mention that today was the first day my student was working with me?! Yeah, didn't some crazy stuff happen the LAST time a student started working with me?! I did quite a bit of delegating, but she definitely had a lot of GREAT learning experiences! (It isn't every day--thank goodness--that a patient gets septic with all the "classic signs" of sepsis, you get to watch a femoral line get placed "emergently", you admit a patient for transplant, OR administering a med that requires every thirty minute blood pressure monitoring...and ALL of these things happened TODAY!!).
Now I am wondering how I can still be awake since it is almost 11:00! My mom came over when I got off and helped me move some branches to the curb (they are making a special pick-up because of the recent storms). I talked to my sister and brother-in-law since he has had a couple "lightheaded"/dizzy episodes this week and they were looking for some "nursing" advice. Then, I talked to my friend who works in the foster care department at the agency I am hoping to complete my licensing through. I ran into her today when she was visiting a patient, but we didn't have time to talk. So, we ended up talking for 30 minutes this evening. It sounds like the woman who does home studies has been really busy doing other things. That works for me since I haven't quite been ready to do that, but some days I feel more ready than others. I still wish my parents were "on board", but I guess it COULD be possible to do it without them, it would just be better with their help and support.
Tomorrow morning I am doing a stem cell donation for research. That involves sitting in one place without use of either arm for over 4 hours...I'm not really excited about it, but hopefully it goes well! Good night!
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