My trainer brought in a new piece of equipment today: the big yoga-whoozit ball:
Little did she know I'd already found my spirit animal. (Source: Head Nurse)
Source: Head Nurse - April 7, 2014 Category: Nurses Authors: Jo Source Type: blogs
My Boyfiend's Back.
I go back to work tomorrow after ten days off. Why, you ask, did I take ten days off in the middle of what is decidedly not vacation season?My boyfiend's back.Specifically, his two-level microdiscectomy and associated recovery time.Boyfiend had worked really hard all late summer and early fall, getting the brewery where he works up and running (yes, Boyfiend makes beer for a living. It's a perfect match.) and had started, just before Thanksgiving, having some pain in his knee. He'd messed up the knee years ago in a bike accident (yes, he rides bikes. Yes, he has a fixie. Yes, he has a beard and skinny jeans and flannel shi...
Source: Head Nurse - March 21, 2014 Category: Nurses Authors: Jo Source Type: blogs
Me working yesterday, after the time change.
(Source: Head Nurse)
Source: Head Nurse - March 10, 2014 Category: Nurses Authors: Jo Source Type: blogs
Bladder, why you do me this way?
Back in nursing school, I had an instructor. Everybody has one of those instructors--the ones whose classes make you yearn for the sweet release of death, or at least a nice case of vascular dementia. I don't remember what she taught, although it couldn't have been that important, since we only met twice a week.She had three hobbyhorses that she managed to work into every class: homeopathy, the importance of cleanses (you know, take a lot of laxatives and eat only pureed grapefruit stuff), and the fact that the nursing shortage was caused by legalized abortion. Oh--one more I forgot--that all nurses hated each other and th...
Source: Head Nurse - March 5, 2014 Category: Nurses Authors: Jo Source Type: blogs
Things that irritate me, part seventy gazillion and thirty-eight
If you're an instructor teaching nurses, please remember that we do "see one/do one/teach one." All you have to do is tell us what we need to know, once, and move on. Your (endless f.ing horrible irritating) anecdotes (that attempt to cast you in a good light but instead make you look like the arrogant asshole you are) are not necessary. Running out of booze.Patients who are reasonable, normal people while you're in the room, but turn into manipulative weirdos the minute you leave. The trouble with calling people like that on their behavior is that it's never satisfying.Staying late in class because of anecdotes.Peopl...
Source: Head Nurse - February 26, 2014 Category: Nurses Authors: Jo Source Type: blogs
I am pleased to report that I am no longer a starfish.
Starting Friday night, I turned my stomach inside-out every hour or two for twenty-eight hours. It SUCKED.Somehow I've managed to avoid--and here I'm knocking frantically on every piece of wood within reach--sinus infections, the flu, things falling on my head, alien abduction, and major broken bones this year. But I got whatever stomach bug is going around, and it SUCKED.But now I'm better. 'Bout damn time, too.Mongo, when I got home on Friday, was solicitous. He did everything but hold my hair back for me (because I have no hair to speak of) and then curled up next to me on the couch, carefully avoiding my stomach, ...
Source: Head Nurse - February 24, 2014 Category: Nurses Authors: Jo Source Type: blogs
I have to go back to work in the morning.
(Actually, all I wanted was an excuse to use this gif. But it's pretty close.) (Source: Head Nurse)
Source: Head Nurse - February 24, 2014 Category: Nurses Authors: Jo Source Type: blogs
I got this comment on a long-ago post. . . .
http://justsaynotonursing.wordpress.com It's a list of thirty-six reasons nobody should go into nursing. The author is a woman who spent eighteen years in a field she hated, then went on to get a medical degree and became a medical registrar. She's in Australia.I'm having a lot of thoughts about this. The first two were along the lines of "How on earth did you survive that long in a job you hated?" and "Why did you even bother?" (Incidentally, I emailed her those two questions, figuring that the answer to the second would be either "kids" or "money," but I'm interested in the answer to the first. I would've flang myse...
Source: Head Nurse - February 10, 2014 Category: Nurses Authors: Jo Source Type: blogs
It's coming. It's coming for all of us.
At this point, it doesn't matter whether it's a mismatch between this year's flu shot and this year's virus, or a secret government plot, or just plain crappy luck: everybody I know, practically, has the flu.We have nine full-time nurses in our unit. Two of them have pneumonia. A third is out for another week, until the Tamiflu and chicken soup kick in. The remaining half-dozen of us are bathing in alcohol foam, refusing to get too close to each other (I swear; it's like Sweden up in there), and running away from anybody with the slightest hint of a cough. I myself have taken to bathing daily in boiling bleach and wrapping...
Source: Head Nurse - February 5, 2014 Category: Nurses Authors: Jo Source Type: blogs
This was an ethical problem with a simple solution.
If you have a patient who's been a heavy drinker and heavy smoker (like five 40-ouncers and a couple packs a day) since their teens, and they're now in their 60's, and they live with family members who are unlikely to stop smoking and drinking just to keep them healthy, and they also live in a food desert and have multiple comorbidities and things generally suck, it is not a dereliction of duty not to suggest that they get their carotid arteries Roto-Rooted in order to restore blood flow to their brain after a minor stroke.Especially since no amount of improved blood flow is going to repair the damage caused by forty years...
Source: Head Nurse - January 30, 2014 Category: Nurses Authors: Jo Source Type: blogs
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) beca...
Source: Head Nurse - January 16, 2014 Category: Nurses Authors: Jo Source Type: blogs
The traditional annual Christmas song post!
(Source: Head Nurse)
Source: Head Nurse - December 24, 2013 Category: Nurses Authors: Jo Source Type: blogs
It's never a good sign when. . . .
It was shaping up to be a pretty good day. I got up a little early, packed my lunch, put the dog outside, left for work on time, and made it to work without incident.Where I walked in to find a patient, destined to be my project for the day, sitting on the floor of his room, screaming. And kicking and tantruming. Like a three-year-old. Refusing to get off the floor. Floods of tears. Demands that we call varied and sundry people.I've got such a hangover from that day that I still can't form complete sentences.Here's all you need to know: functional exam, drug-seeking, requesting Dilaudid (of course). Fourteen chart notes by...
Source: Head Nurse - November 7, 2013 Category: Nurses Authors: Jo Source Type: blogs
Let's talk about cancer.
Three years ago at this time I was lying on the couch, watching St. Elmo's Fire with Friend Pens The Lotion S., feeling rather giddy from a combination of red wine and Vicodin. I had just had the majority of my hard palate and all of my soft palate removed due to a case of oral cancer. If you want to read the whole story, go back to September of 2010 in the archives.(St. Elmo's Fire is a good movie filled with terrible people. Skip it; that way, you won't have to wish for that two hours of your Vicodin- and red-wine-soaked life back.)Let's talk about oral cancers. There are a lot of them, some of them frightening, some of ...
Source: Head Nurse - October 30, 2013 Category: Nurses Authors: Jo Source Type: blogs
Of plumbium and bidets, of subway tile and new nurses, of cabbages and kings.
This week was long. People, I tell you: wearing leads for seven hours a day, five days a week, will wear. you. the f.. out.Let me back up.Sunday last I stepped through my bathroom floor. Yes, that bathroom floor. The bathroom floor that the Ex Chefboy and I spent something like six weeks demolishing and redoing. I stepped through the floor. Because it had rotted. From something. I don't know what. Don't ask me. La la la la laaaa.Monday I started cross-training for angiography/interventional radiology/that weird place waaaaay down the hall in the basement next to the operating rooms where they make you wear hairnets, like, ...
Source: Head Nurse - October 25, 2013 Category: Nurses Authors: Jo Source Type: blogs
