Bitter endings, sweet beginnings, and blessings in disguise.

I really do consider myself lucky. I have a dear friend who works on another floor who said that since this nurse manager has taken over the number of code blues and rapid responses called to my former floor have become astronomical when in the past one of the benefits of working that particular floor was that kind of emergenc being few and far between. I'm honestly not surprised. When the educator was following me around that night, my patient had just come up, had a pain block and had 0/0 pain on arrival and hadn't even touched his PCA yet. He started using it while we turned/rolled him. The educator was alone in the room with him to see what he thought of my care after we were done with him and I walked in on her talking to him with him saying "no she's not meeting my needs, I need more pain medicine. She lied and told me I could have it every 7 minutes but it's every 10." He had locked himself out of his PCA in the time he spent talking to her. I was not the one who told him he could have it every however many minutes, it was the PACU nurse when she set it up, but I didn't bother defending myself. I wanted to use other interventions because that was a lot of Dilaudid in a short time and it often has a cummulative effect in the elderly, but the educator got right on me and was like "you heard him, his pain medication is ineffective, you need to give him more medicine" so on so forth. I felt pressed against the wall to give him a rescue dose, and I wish I listened to my gut instinct or told her to give it then but I was afraid that would've sealed my fate, because he was very sedated for awhile after that rescue dose and I had him keep doing his incentive spirometer to take deep breaths. But yippy, his pain was under control...It's no big surprise that much of the floor's rapid responses are respiratory/PCA related. There are a handful of situations that I felt "if this is what nursing is about I made the wrong career choice." I sincerely hope it's just the ethics of this hospital. I have this fantasy that people who work with children will really love their jobs, but I know there will be miserable people no matter where I go. I'll just have to love my job twice as much then.