Things That Go Boooop In The Night

UM Review RN, ASN, RN

I figured something out last night. The maker of grocery carts changed jobs. You know you grab a grocery cart, the wheels start shimmying like four strippers with thongs full of loose change? Yeah, that's the guy. Well, he went south. To Florida. To manufacture dinamaps.

Every blasted one has wheels that don't turn, cords that catch under, over, and onto anything that passes near. The machine is accompanied by a constant booooop-boooooop-boooooop sound the moment it's touched by human hands.

I believe there's a little fiend sitting inside the machine trying to make as much racket as possible so that there is no such thing as quietly slipping into a room in the dimly lighted wee hours to take one patient's vitals without waking every patient within 50 yards. Patients hear those hard plastic wheels screee-screeee-screeee across the floor, stop, and then begin the booop-booooop-booop sound.

Ever notice that you can never silence the alarm for long enough to get a full set of vitals?

As I said, I finally figured it out. It's all part of the focus on customer service. As in, "see how much noise we're making? It means we are not sitting at desks all night long, playing solitaire on the computer. It means we are working, working tirelessly through the night, to convince you that you are getting the best service that your health-care dollar can buy, yes we are!"

Sleep? Oh no, you don't! You are a patient here and you will notice that we are working hard to keep you alive every single minute of the day.

Studies have proven that sleep deprivation induces a hallucinatory effect.

Which is why the patient might think he dreamt that lab tech coming into his room and snapping on the brightest overhead lights, raising the bed to the highest position, slapping a tourniquet on the patient's arm and then reassuring him, "don't worry, you can go right back to sleep after I'm done here."

Yeah, right.

The patient has no clue that the evil lab tech has to pierce his skin 12 times a day for that weird neuro lab order that the nerdy genius doc playing house and trying to diagnose zebras when he's in a herd of mustangs just has to have, timed at precisely the time that the poor confused patient has finally gone to sleep. The doc doesn't get blamed; the lab tech does.

The doc doesn't have to pick the poor sleepless patient up off the floor after the lab tech is gone and the patient figures he might as well get up to the bathroom since he's awake anyway; the nurses do. The unit gets dinged for a patient fall and everyone has to suffer through endless root cause questions.

Don't you wish the questions on the fall risk behaviors of patients were realistic? Not this namby-pamby stuff:

Q: was the patient trying to get out of bed when he/she fell?

Yes ___ no ___

Don't you ever feel the sudden urge to write:

A: yes, you blooming idiots, because the lab tech had to wake the patient for the timed draw that dr. Genius wanted at 0400. Ya think there's any correlation to the fact that the (confused due to sleep-deprivation) patient wanted to get out of bed 15 minutes after that lab draw?????

You finish calling everyone from here to England, document in three different places, and place 2 different alarms on the poor, befuddled patient, who by now truly don't know if it's day or night.

Then it's time for more vitals.....And here comes the Kraken...Er, I mean, dinamap.

One day the man who invented this machine will get a taste of the little monster he created. It'll be coming.....Coming for him.....At 0400...Right behind the lab tech...

I only hope I get to be his nurse.

Things That Go Boooop In The Night

About UM Review RN, ASN, RN

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