Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. . . . .

It's been a rough couple of weeks on the neurocritical care unit.Marcie left; she went to neurosurgery's clinic, to cat-herd all their patients into craniotomies and gamma radiation. Kitty is in Europe as a whole for a month--actually forty days--and I'm wondering what the f. I'm supposed to do without her, since I can't get the EKG printer to work correctly. Deej is going to work in a post-surgical ICU near The Schw.iest Mall Ever. And I'm left, oddly enough, as the nurse that everybody turns to when they have a question.I wasn't expecting this. First I was a new nurse, but with experience in places much weirder than Sunnydale (Healthcare For The Hellmouth)--thirteen year olds with a methadone card and a 17-week uterus, or a bookstore where people might actually pull out a gun if you didn't buy back their obviously stolen books. Then I was a slightly experienced nurse, with some questions about the finer points of, say, Mobitz blocks or pseudobulbar syndrome.Then, all of a sudden, I was that nurse everybody turns to.There's Beth, but she's more cardiac than neuro. And there's Shiny, but she's not particularly forthcoming, although her smile lights up her face and she's always ready to help. She thinks her English is worse than it is, so she keeps to herself.So I'm the one everybody calls when they have an IV they can't start. Or when they have a patient who's suddenly satting 80 percent on a nonrebreather. Or when the 97-year-old granny who's on palliative care decides to st...
Source: Head Nurse - Category: Nursing Authors: Source Type: blogs