"Together"

Arts and crafts time. My mural contribution at work.

Combat

There are days that going to work is like going to combat. Receiving the night assignment through SBAR (a Navy communication tool), gearing up with your equipment (saline flushes, stethoscope, scissors, etc.), and hitting the ground running – non-stop.

Shouldn't really complain. Compared to what my brother in Baghdad, this is probably nothing.

"You cut me open and I keep on bleeding ..."

Inappropriate song to sing at work, Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love."
I kept telling my co-worker this. But she will not stop, because I won't stop giggling.

Spent

As in emotionally and physically.
Must've been because it was my third night in a row with this dying patient, because when he passed away with me and his family members present, I lost it. I shed tears in front of the patient's family as I consoled them. That has never happened before. Snapped to professional mode and had to collect myself in the bathroom.

And my next admission a few hours after that was another case that'll break anyone's heart ...

I may talk like a cynic, but I'm a real softie.

Need to reignite myself by getting lost in life's simple joys ...

Young'uns

"Venting to Heal It":

Been taking care of young patients lately. Young as in younger than me or close to my age.
Not all of them are terminal. But when they are, it gets to me. "Mortality," as Keats wrote, "weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep" in those times and it scares me. But it also helps me prioritize what's important in my life.

That was a downer, now here's an upper from that much-missed Gary Larson strip, "The Far Side":

... When Nurses Attack!

As if we don't have other things to worry about - like patients attacking us - we also have to be careful of other nurses. "Nurses eat their young" have a fancy scientific name: lateral violence.

Read on from the Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing (Vol.12, No. 3):

Understanding Lateral Violence in Nursing by Sheridan-Leos, N.

When Patients Attack!

From NY Times:

Nurses Step Up Efforts to Protect Against Attacks

By DAVID TULLER

Published: July 8, 2008

Advocates for nurses are lobbying for increased penalties for violent patients and urging that all incidents be reported.
(Click HERE to read more.)

We were just discussing about this at work because one of our patients became verbally and physically abusive to one of the nurses. My co-worker asked, "How come we can't do anyting when they try to hit us?" She meant file charges or at least file a complaint. My answer basically was that it comes with the job. I expected patients to be like that, since I've grown up hearing my mom's tales of when patients attack. Now, I have my stories, too. One is of a 90-year old lady trying to take a swing at me. My other question to my co-worker: Can a patient be responsible for his/her actions when they are confused (whether from psych or physical reasons)? I don't really have an answer. Different hospitals deal with that in some way, I'm sure. Hasn't come up for me yet, so I haven't investigated.

Spurred by the article, I tried to see if NY was doing anything along those lines. In NY state, NYSNA is lobbying for Bill A06186. The bill would make assault on nurses a class C or D felony, equal to assaulting a police officer. However, the bill seems very specific in only being applied to emergency situations, as in first aid, or in ER cases. What happens to nurses in inpatient med/surg units? Maybe I should just work with babies. They don't hit you at all. The OR maybe? They're too knocked out to even lift a finger. Bill AO6186 is currently referred to the Codes Committee.

See, that Nursing and Society class actually paid off.

Comic

We started a newsletter in our unit to boost staff morale.
The editor asked me to contribute something funny for the comic section. Apparently, in her eyes I'm the class clown.
I trawled the net for cartoons and brought three for her to choose from: corny, gross-out, and inappropriate. Corny won out. Much to my dismay, this one was rejected:



(http://www.buckcash.com/toons.html)