Pictures! For you!

I've got some new photos of the girls to share: Go see.

I know, I know, I'm torturing you... Bookmark the new blog and just get it overwith.

A new post!

but it's over here.

tut tut

Well I'm sorry this is such a boring place to visit these days. The sad truth is it is an accurate reflection of my life. If I were to blog just what's going on in my head it would probably be broken down like this:

75% devoted to how tired I am
8% devoted to how bored of my job I am
6% devoted to what I'm doing at work aside from working
5% devoted to how I wish I was at home sleeping
3% devoted to how I wish my tush would just heal already
2% devoted to actual extracurricular activities
1% devoted to how very real the danger of me falling asleep at my lab bench with my head falling flat in my ice bucket is

So rather than completely overloading my "Whine-fest 2007" tag, I've just opted to not blog. PLUS it doesn't help the situation that my new coworker is brand new and young meaning he's all about being productive and actively working every moment he's at work. What's up with that? Consequently I feel mild to moderately guilty for sitting at my computer to do non-work related activities during the work day. And let's face it, when I get home at 11:30 or midnight I'm generally not in the mood to put my day into words. Though I'm sure it would end with "a;dklsfhjguijxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" from me passing out on the keyboard.

Um, and can I please tell you that my new coworker actually sent my boss an email yesterday complaining that he doesn't have enough work to do and he's bored. WHO does that?! Please tell me! I know this only because when I went to collect a specimen from her in the OR she was like "so I got an email from [coworker] saying he's bored and doesn't have enough work, would you please inform him there is PLENTY to be done?" If he complains again I think I may be like "here, I have a stack of patient folders that need to be entered into the database, knock yourself out"

I will tell you however (see once I get started I can't shut up... it's that second cup of coffee I'm having for lunch... Yes, at 2pm) that Hubbin and I are currently midway through the second season of Prisonbreak on DVD and that is hands down the best television show EVER. If I was ever home we would already be done, it's so addicting I will watch it episode after episode after episode.

This week was our first test for the fall semester. I got a 74% which is technically failing because a 75% is the lowest passing grade. That's kind of disappointing, HOWEVER, the class average was 68%... so I failed, just not as badly as most people. Clincal is completely wearing me out this semester since they are keeping us each night till 11pm. (then I drive home, get there at 11:45 take a shower to wash the flith off of me, go to bed and get back up at 6am) but I have the best clinical instructor this semester, she's AWESOME, I'm really happy with her.

Random Bits

We had an exciting weekend for us. I've finally made the big leap from nursing-school-context-friends with someone into real-life-friends with someone. We had them over a few weekends ago for cookout/beer on the backporch and as a result they returned the favor by inviting us over to their house for Labor Day festivities. It was a fun time, it was nice hanging out with people our, well, my, age for once. That said it was a liiiittle weird because while I like my friend very much, and her long time boyfriend seems very nice as well, his friends are SKET.CHY. Like, capitalized sketchy, not just a little bit. As in, pants down below the belt, gold chain wearing, chain smoking, finishing every sentence with "'n-shit" sketchy. I got hit on by one member of said sketchy party. He told me this marvelously well thought out joke which I will not repeat because it's not worth your time I will summarize only by telling you the punchline is: "everytime I drop my fly the pu$$y gets wet". .... *blinks*.... ????.... *blinks*. I wonder if that's worked well enough for him at any point in time that he feels it's an appropriate pick up tactic? Unfortunately for him, I'm married and just a SHADE harder to impress.

As for my life today, I'm not going to tell you that I took a nap in the backseat of my car while my western was running. And I'm not going to tell you that I bought a bag of snyder's honey mustard & onion pretzels today (*drool*). I also won't tell you that I wanted a small bag but they only had large bags and now I've eaten nearly the whole thing. Whoopsies. They just taste so good! It ought to be a crime.

Funky Nurses

The big lesson last night in clinical was learning what kind of nurse we do NOT want to be. Whew. Every single nurse and nursing assistant was in a major funk last night. Maybe someday when I'm a nurse I'll understand why none of the nurses want nursing students but for right now as far as I can see it's like having an extra set of hands... I don't know why that would piss someone off.

The thing about nursing students is everything is new and exciting to us so if the nurse turns to you and says "I need a bandaid, will you go get a bandaid?" You think "SWEET! A task! I hope I do good!" and then run about to find the best band-aid you can find.

For some reason every nurse on our unit that was assigned a student last night gave us nothing but bitchy attitude when asked for report and then anytime we asked them anything.

Our instructor sent us out of our pre-shift meeting to get report from our nurse and assess the patient. There is only so much information we can get from the medical history print out. I'm not asking for a 20 minute dissertation about the patient but a simple "this is what's going on, this is what we need to accomplish, this is what you should or should not do". Is that so much to ask?

My nurse gave me a two sentence report "She came in this morning with DKA and blood sugar 452. She's very groggy, you can help her set up her menu and TV, but don't wake her up." Then she was annoyed because I asked how you set up the menu and TV... but I mean for crying out loud it was our second night. I had the best experience trying to get report. By far.

In the first hour we were there our instructor actually filed a report because one of the nurses was so rude to one of the students who had asked for report. Not that the other nurses weren't, this one just happened to do it within earshot of our instructor. See, the thing some of these nurses don't seem to have caught onto is that our instructor is actually one of the advanced practice nurses who is in charge of that particular unit (not just some random community college teacher). So it would be a little like giving the finger to someone at work with a bit more authority than you.

Unfortunately for me, my patient I had spent all afternoon preparing to take care of and looking up drugs for had been discharged. Since I got a new spur of the moment assignment I wasn't allowed to passmeds . As a rule (a big rule) we are not permitted to do ANYTHING drug related without our instructor standing by our side. Since I was not passingmeds I was doubly not allowed to do anything medication related... as a result, when I went into my patient's room and found her IV pump alarming a "down occlusion" I had to do nothing and report it to the nurse. So I did. She glared at me then went into the room, promptly returned from the room and said "ok, lets look at this pump" I followed, she said, "What does it say". I said "Down occlusion". Then she proceeded to explain to me in a sarcastictalking to a three year old tone, "you need to check the line, do this, do this, do this"... To which I really wanted to reply, look lady, I know you're pissed I dragged you away from your seat by the computer but I'm not allowed to so much as touch this stuff without my instructor present aside from that I'm not doingmeds tonight at all... that's why I told you.

Then another nurse handed me a stack of drugs and told me to put them in 14's drug drawer, so I went, but the name on the drawer did not match the stack of drugs she gave me, so I took them back to her. She said "well I KNOW that, it's a new patient, put them in the drawer and take the name off the drawer" I continued to look puzzled, because I know this is something I shouldn't be doing till she blasted out of her chair took them from me and said "FINE, NEVERMIND, I'LL do it" and stormed off.

The funny story from last night was our instructor was telling us the importance of visually checking on a patient who's heartrate monitor has alarmed. When it alarms we're to go to the nurse's station, see who's alarming, then go check the patient in person. (Here again we go excitedly following instructions to the best of our ability)... So a monitor alarms, me and Beth go, see it's room 13, go to room 13 and stand there staring at the sleeping patient. Just try to visualize this: We're the first two arriving on the scene, it's 10pm, the patient is asleep and snoring, the lights are dimmed. The two nursing students stand therewhipsering to each other: "Ok , but how do we know if she's having a heart attack?" "I don't know? She's snoring? So she's breathing right?" "Would you always wake up if you're having a heart attack?" "I don't know? Should we wake her?" "I don't know, she looks calm maybe we should ask the instructor for some more specific instructions on what to do when we GET to the room to check on the patient"

On our way to find the instructor one of the cranky nurses passed going into the room so we turned on our heels to follow to seeexacly HOW you check on a patient with an alarming heart monitor. The nurse turns and raises her eyebrows and says "Can I help you with something?" So I sweetly replied our instructor sent us to check on the patient but we weren't sure what to do so we were going to watch you to see what to do." Then her whole attitude changed and she seemed much warmer. She flicked on the lights and woke the woman and checked the blood pressure, heart rate, asked her how she was feeling, explained why she was there and then showed us how to replace the electrodes and make sure they were all still good. Beth and I were completely thrilled, we thanked her.

I spent most of the night just answering call bells. My patient slept all night, and I mean all night. She would wake, ask for ice, when I got back with the ice she was asleep again. I was incredibly bored last night because all the other students were passingmeds so that was the big focus and I wasn't. I was ok answering call bells for a while, but with all the attitude we were getting from all directions it made us much less willing to help than we had been the night before

"zzzzz"

Oh I'm sorry, I must have fallen asleep at my desk again.

Sorry I haven't been as good about posting, this semester is totally beating me up. Combined with the coworker change over and the last minute deadlines my boss keeps tossing at me "here catch" I haven't had spare time at work or home for updating. I am still slooowly exploring switching over to my NEW WORDPRESS BLOG... go see. And to entice you to go visit and tell me what you think I've offically linked my flickr account to the new blog so if you go look, you will then have free lisence to look through all my online photos. I guess that's truthfully why I haven't posted, I've spent my internet time at home recently removing names and face shots from flickr. Don't worry I've left up 312 photos including a gratuitous amounts of tegu photos. If you know anything about flickr you can tag photos, I recommend checking out my photos tagged with "What will the tegu eat?" for a good laugh.

Dreaming of Sleep

...You're just going to have to excuse spelling and grammar... I'm stareing cross-eyed at the computer and just can't bring myself back to the top to edit.

So I'm on my 4th day of the new semester. So far this week between work and school I've worked 43 hours and that was just through Wednesday. I'll be leaving clinical tonight at 11pm, so that's another 16 hours today and 8 tomorrow. zzzzzz. I do believe I will be arriving late to work on Friday and leave late. I don't think I can drag myself out of bed after 5 hours of sleep again.

I had a total anxiety attack last night when we were having our 1st meeting of clinical and the second clinical instructor at my site (there are two groups of us there) was saying she wanted the patient clinical prep, drug cards, care plan, and teaching plan ready to turn in for us to take care of our patients today. My jaw hit the floor and my eyes were like 3 inches wide. Because we left last night at 11, I got home about 11:45, showered, went to bed at 12:30 and got up at 6 for work where I will stay till I leave to arrive at my clinical shift beginning at 3pm. When exactly am I supposed to accomplish the 3+hours of work she assigned?! I mean drug cards, lets be honest, it takes me 45 minutes PER and I have yet to meet a hospital patient that's on less than 6 medications.

I spent all day yesterday attempting to train my favorite coworker's new replacement. My favorite coworker sent me an email from medschool asking for the full scoop on her replacement and this is an excerpt from what I wrote:
Email Day #1
He's cute, as in attractive cute. My first impression was he was a little cocky, but maybe because I only saw him for 10 minutes. He so does not respect my authori-tay yet.

Email Day #2
He is cocky in a young-20s boy kind of way. We did two practice rats today, I did one and he did one along side me. Not TOO bad. He totally lacks the careful finesse we have and is more along the lines of a fellow but at his last lab was apparently dissecting retina out of mice so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that by the time he's done with the next two practice rats it won't look quite so hacked up. He did nick the vagina and so I had to give him a little lecture about how even little nicks are a big deal for the biomechanics testing.

This morning my boss comes out of her office and walks over to me with this like half smile on her face and telling me in a hushed voice that the fellow has already called her to bitch about the new guy, lol. The fellow told my boss that he acts very arrogant and cocky etc etc and after she showed him once how to do something he went over to the computer to work on applications for the rest of the day. lol and my boss saw me smiling and goes "what? do you think he's cocky too?" and I said "Yeah actually I sent [old coworker] an email yesterday describing him as a cocky 22 year old boy" and she was like "oh this is not good at all, there is nothing I hate more than cocky boys, we're going to have to stop this right away"... lol.

On a personal note I went back to the doctor Tuesday because I was worried my incision was getting infected (because there hasn't really been any improvement in the last week) so they gave me some antibiotics. Apparently the risk of infection for this surgery is very low because they didn't even perscribe antibiotics from the start. I'm doing fine but still just generalized discomfort in the area, it hurts to walk and I have to be gentle about sitting. Because of the location they don't stitch the incision closed (because of tension?) so I have an open surgical wound that has to be cleaned carefully and packed with gauze. Here's hoping it closes up speedily now that I'm on antibiotics -- and for no Cdiff.