You know how, sometimes, things get brown and ucky and dull?

That's the way things have been around here, lately. Every couple of years I kind of brown-out--not burn out--on work, and blogging, and people and nursing generally.Then I get better.That is what happened this last couple of months: I browned out and then got better.A lot of it had to do with work. You guys might've heard that the flu season has started. We have a thirty-bed medical CCU, and sixteen of those beds are filled by people under the age of 50 on ventilators or ECMO (a way of oxygenating blood by taking it out of your body, zapping it with O2 through a membrane, and returning it--sort of like lung dialysis) because of the flu. These are previously-healthy people, too. The old and sick ones are just flat-out dying.Plus, there seems to be a sale on myesthenia gravis these days. I hear that if you have six patients with MG in your NCCU at once, you'll get an eggroll. I need our eggrolls to be delivered, please.Meanwhile, as the plague is sweeping the state (and our staff), we were preparing for a couple of really hugely f.ing important surveys. One was a TDH (Department of Health) thing that happens occasionally, just to make sure we're not all licking our hands clean between patients. Another was a certification survey, which was a very, very big deal, given that the surveyors would be coming to our unit, primarily, and going through charts and asking tough questions and so on.Joint Commission surveys are generally held to be bullshit. They go like this: everything g...
Source: Head Nurse - Category: Nurses Authors: Source Type: blogs