Worst day, or worst day ever?

So we have this new thing at Sunnydale: the nurses from the neurocritical care unit charge for both the NCCU and an overflow surgical/med-surg/ortho unit on a different floor.Right now we have our usual nine beds in NCCU and eleven beds on the other floor. (I ' ll call it " ortho, " because it ' s mostly post-op and pre-op orthopedic cases, but there are important exceptions, one detailed below.) Once the NCCU expands to include epilepsy patients and an epilepsy monitoring unit, we ' ll have a total of twenty-six rooms to charge: thirteen on each floor, with the possibility of two of those rooms on each floor being double-occupancy. That ' s thirty patients, give or take.On two different floors.Yesterday I got saddled with charging both units. Tiny Dancer and Diamond Bright were on the CCU side, and Bender and Kali were on the ortho side. Thank God for good assignments: ortho was staffed with two experienced nurses, and Tiny Dancer, though she ' s new, is totally unflappable. She moves through life with her head held high, her posture perfect, and her hands and feet moving at a million miles an hour, if need be.Halfway through the day I had two critically ill patients on the ortho unit, three different patients who needed blood (no overlap there), a very sick person on the neuro floor, two interns, no nurse aides, and no prospect of lunch. Did I mention that these two units are on different floors? As in, I have to ride the damn elevator to get from one to another?I did? Okay...
Source: Head Nurse - Category: Nursing Authors: Source Type: blogs