134 total hours worked for the pay period.

Ouch.

Definitely a Personal Best.

The last 8 days have hurt. A lot.

With the exception of last Monday I’ve worked 12-16 hours each day. Last Monday was a short day at only 8 hours. Right now I’m at 74 hours worked. Ouch. There’s still forty to work this week. Plus meetings Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, adding an additional 6+ hours.

This will definitely be an all time high for this hospital for me.

Hell, it may be a personal  best.

This doesn’t include the call hours. 24 +48 +8 +8 +8 +8+ 24=128 hours of call.

I’m so tired.

I can say that, right?

I think I’ll snag a nap before work.

I took last week off. The reasons are varied: need to take PTO before I cap out and stop accruing more, we were supposed to go to DC but my husband’s now new job says he can’t get the time off, it’s the last week of the Spring semester and therefore the work is light. But, yeah, I took the week off.

I kept call Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights but otherwise no work.

I planned to take call on the Sunday that bookended my week off.

And I just got home from 12 straight hours, three laparoscopic cases, 1 jaw versus tree, and one there is a fracture we need to fix it.

12 hours.

I forget how much the Universe hates it when I take time off.

And bitch slaps me when I go back to work.

I have been reflecting on nursing and informatics  (the blend of technology that is nursing these days). It’s for class.

I think that nurses struggle to be human sometimes. The patient is so poised on a precipice always, where one wrong move, or phrase, or miscalculation, or incorrect data entry can lead to disaster that nurses are aware of this always.  Keeping patients safe is what we do, however that means to us.

But, nurses struggle with that sometimes.

Nurses also struggle with how much patients and their families don’t know or don’t understand.

I remind myself often that my knowledge bank is not the patient’s knowledge base. Of course they don’t know/comprehend/understand. Illness is far beyond their purview.

I use a big word, where a small easily understandable word is better. See also purview, previous paragraph.

I use five words when one would do.

But I am human, not a machine.

And that’s okay.

There is a woman at work who I categorically DO NOT LIKE.

And this is hard for me. It is really hard for me not to like anyone, I’m just not wired like that. But I dislike her soooo much. I can hardly stand to be in the same room with her.

Not that she’s not a perfectly nice person, I think.

It is that she is so awful at her job.

I mean terrible. She is needy, she doesn’t think ahead, she thinks stocking a room involves copious amounts of leggings and under buttocks drapes. Oh, and the latex free gloves that do not belong in the room. Every evening I have to take out the latex free gloves that she has put in the rooms. Every night.

She has called me down to the basement where she was putting away supplies, out of a room where I was circulating (that means working) to tell me that she couldn’t find where to put three things and could I put them away for her? Not, could I show her where they went, but to put them away for her.

Last week when she was about to open her damned fool mouth and ask for something, for the fifth time in ten minutes when I was her circulator. No, I mean something, 2 minutes later something else, etc etc. I told her it was easier for the circulators if she could group her requests. And maybe, just maybe, think ahead to what she needs before the case starts, instead of drawing on the back table.

I feel we really bonded today.

But today, today takes the cake.

I was in a room, working, when she came into the room to tell me that for some reason she was working three Sundays straight and she asked me why. As if I had an answer I could pull out of my ass. As if we weren’t getting a patient off the table at that exact moment.

And then I heard it, the charge phone was ringing. My hand dropped to my pocket, not there. Dammit, I left it at the desk.

She followed me out to the desk and told me that “Oh, yeah, something was ringing, but she really needed an answer to her question.”

Um, the phone was ringing. Did it not occur to her to pick up the damned phone and answer it?

Dear God.

Dumb as a box of hair.

I told her that I would have to look into it and went back to the room.

Definitely too stupid to work evening shift.

We have standards.

I like to work, I may have mentioned it before, a couple of times, maybe, once or twice.

And as much as I like to work, I equally like call.

Call is where I have to be available to the department, never being more than 30 minutes away. And I’m okay with that. I like to be useful and I like to be available when people need me. I’ll answer calls and questions even if I’m not on call and have no financial incentive to answer the phone. But I do. Cause I like to be smart and answer questions.

But I like call, a lot, because that makes me useful and that is my end goal in life. To be useful.

I am the first person new nurses to the department takes call with. This way I get to be a teacher, which is something I love to do, and can teach them how to survive call on their own.

Because it’s hard.

Nursing is hard.

OR nursing is hard.

Anything we can do for each other is helpful.

I know that call is hateful to some people. So I make myself available to take call from anyone who wants to give it up. But I rarely ask to take it from people. I much prefer to have it offered. I tell the new nurses and older nurses in the department that I am available to take call if need be. Because I’m the call dog of the department. And that’s okay.

I can be useful.

Congratulate me! I can now save your life with CPR.

Of course, I could before 1200 today.

But I passed the practical test today.

With the dummies.

In a secret conference room at the top of the hospital.

With no directional signs to get you there.

With no pretest paperwork. (bad me, I agree. I took the theory part of the class three weeks ago. And I passed with 100%)

So I may have been a wee belligerent when I showed up.

But the people were nice.

And explained to me that next year there would be more evening friendly classes, except for the one that they had this month. But didn’t advertise it. And I work 1500-2300, who wants to go to class at 0700. And they only classes that we in the OR knew about was Oct 8 and Oct 30.

And told me that the list of all available classes are on the intranet under people soft.

Pffft. As if. No they are not, I’ve looked every month for the last three when I knew that I had to renew.

And we don’t have the cards with us, but give us a self addressed envelope and we will mail them to you. We will spend easily $100 to do this.

Ahem.

But I can save your life.

still

just like yesterday.

I wrote this a year ago, guess what? There are no evening friendly classes.

Still. Only two practicum classes, at the end of the month, during the morning.

Yeah, tell me how that works for me on evenings?

I know I’ve been spotty about posting new entries.

It’s my own fault.

Oh, and school.

Nursing school is not for sissies.

Yes, I’ve already graduated from nursing school. Twice!

Once in 2001 with my Associates Degree of Nursing.

Once in 2016 with my Bachelor’s of the Science of Nursing.

I may have mentioned this at the beginning of dispatches from the evening shift.

I’m back in nursing school.

For the fourth time, if you count the two years I did at Creighton before I hurt my shoulder, lost my Air Force Scholarship and was forced to leave school.

This time I’m after my Master’s in the Science of Nursing.

There are three different tracks for MSN at my college.

One is for nursing administration. Um, no thank you. I have no desire to be the big boss.

One is for training to be a nurse practitioner. I know many nurse practitioners, but I just don’t like patients/people that well.

The last is for education. I would love to teach, but I would love more the write. It’s my fallback for when I can’t do OR anymore.

My husband asked me if I wanted to go for my PhD. If I want to teach online or at the collegiate level, I would need it. I don’t think so, especially with the way the government is functioning these days. So I’m holding that in reserve.

Apologies if this is a retread, it feels like a retread. But, as mentioned, nursing school is not for sissies.

If you need me I’ll be writing my 5 page paper that’s due on Wednesday.

Because I’m not a sissy.

You know that scene in Wrath of Khan, where Captain James T. Kirk is bellowing in anger and grief “KHAN!!!”? Yeah, that one. Today I went around yelling ENDO!!! No grief but plenty of rage.

There was an 0800 hemi-arthroplasty case for an on-call doctor. An endo doc called and asked if she could go at 0730. My reaction, that I bolstered with my assistant manager via text was no. We would have been going back to the room shortly after 0730, especially with this doctor. My phone would not stop ringing; a cancellation for Monday, a second add on that wanted to be done at 0930 which I scheduled for after the hemi at 1030, and a request to schedule an endo case at 0730. I spent half of my case on the phone, setting all the pieces together to form a Sunday.

And then the hemi cancelled. I scheduled the second case for 0930, and told endo that they could go at 0800. They called and asked to add a second case, I said only if they were done by 0930, as there was a case. They called again and asked to add a third case. I said no, no, no, no, hell no.

And then the hemi surgeon called and had a second hip fracture and wanted to go at 0800. I hated to disappoint him but I had filled that spot up. We settled on 1030.

When I arrived at the hospital at 0830 I went through my usual pre-case routine. Upon realizing that there was a 7 deep queue for the transporter, my tech and I went and fetched the patient from Med-Surg. I go in search of my CRNA, who was down to do the endo case. It was 0915 and they hadn’t even started yet. They didn’t even have a patient in their department yet. They had been waiting 45 minutes for transport. No, I don’t know why they didn’t go up themselves but that’s a story for another time.

The case I told them had to be finished at 0930, in order to complete our cascade of cases for the rest of the morning, didn’t even start until 0935. ARRGGGHHH!!!

Oh, and the orthopedic surgeon had arrived forty five minutes early. Of course.

The endo case finished at 1030, throwing off my entire morning. Instead of finishing at 1130, we finished at 1330.

ENDO!!!