Halloween Rant

[toastyphoenix, ASN]

Have been in medical field over a decade. Have worked many holidays (the pay is excellent if you're picking up, and most relatives are busy cooking and visiting other people instead of demanding that Papa Chuck, who hasn't stood in 2 years, be assisted to walk the hall -right this instant!). The last year I've been in one hospital, and by far Halloween weekend has been worst holiday ever. Christmas and Christmas Eve? New Year's Eve and New Year's? Those are 2 days. If your family's celebrating on a different day, you work the actual holiday, or if you're scheduled to work, tough crap. But people can't seem to decide when to celebrate Halloween. Our town is trick-or-treating the Thursday prior to Halloween, Grandma's town does it Friday, the Halloween dance is Saturday, but the actual holiday isn't until the following Tuesday, so apparently providers just need to take the whole week off. Good luck getting a wound specialist, plastic surgeon, nephrologist, or any of their residents on the phone, and there isn't a snowball's chance they will come to the bedside to address the malfunctioning wound vac and dressing they've specifically instructed RNs and hospital attending not to touch. Naturally, this makes the patients a tad toasty, and those RNs and attendings are the only ones around, so why not take all that frustration out on them? This is especially crappy for the faithful few techs who come into work, because any tech who is a parent and wasn't granted the day off is going to call out, leaving that lone tech scrambling to care for 32 patients and the RNs up to their ears in Cdif stool and over-filled she-wees. The surrounding and in house ERs can't "just have this patient waiting for a bed for 3 hours", so instead they send the patient without calling report, to lie on a stretcher waiting on a clean room - because of course that patient will be happier waiting in the halls for a room to open up, and there is absolutely no way they will have any kind of emergency waiting there until the attending is assigned the patient (because no, they're not a hospital attending's patient until the patient has a floor room) and it absolutely doesn't matter that they are no longer under the ER attending's care either.  And who are the transport specialists angry with? The RNs, because it is definitely our fault that all our beds are full, and we definitely could've sent home all these patients in isolation rooms hours ago. This happens occasionally on a regular shift, but 3 times in one Halloween weekend is ridiculous. End rant. Outside of natural and man-made disasters and pandemics, what do you find to be the worst shifts to work in your practice setting?