I'm sooooooo glad it's Saturday!! This past week has literally been the week from Hell at work.......every single day we've been bombarded with admission after admission, most of them coming after 3PM when we lose at least one nurse and two aides. :stone It's been completely insane.......seems like half the elderly population has come down with either pneumonia or small-bowel obstruction, and half the younger population wound up in MVAs. These have all been days when you could put 20 staff members out there and it wouldn't be enough.........not when you've got a septic MR/DD pt. (with a mental age of 18 months) crashing in one room and a new admit who's been over-anticoagulated to the point where he'll bleed out if you so much as breathe on him in another, along with a terminal CA pt. with brain mets who's crawling out of bed and a discharge who wants to go home five minutes ago.
It's one thing when you have ONE shift like this, but an entire WEEK?? Thank God I got to float yesterday and spent the entire shift in OB-GYN, where I was busy but not overwhelmed with two couplets and a fresh post-hysterectomy patient. I heard it was bad on my 'home' floor though, and I felt bad for them because everyone was just as tired and grumpy as I was, and yet they still had to soldier on while I enjoyed relative peace and quiet in the Women's Center.
These are the (rare) times when I find myself seriously questioning my sanity and wondering how much longer my body is going to hold out under these conditions. Some days, I don't even get to lunch until three or four in the afternoon, and the rest of my breaks just never happen even though I'm supposed to take them. My back aches; my feet and legs complain all night after a bad shift; I'm not sleeping well; I'm almost always tired. (Granted, I need to lose a lot of weight, though I already feel better now after two weeks of eating higher-quality foods and having lost eight pounds.) But on days like the four I've had at work this week, I think to myself that I'm getting too old for this $h*^.......even if I weighed 100 pounds sopping wet, I'd still be exhausted.
Why does nursing have to be so punishing sometimes? I love med/surg, and I know the working conditions at my hospital are among the best anywhere; still, I wish I didn't go home so often in pain from running for a solid 8 or 9 hours, feeling like I did a lousy job even though I know I did the best I could. Sometimes I'm happy just to have made it through the shift with my meds given on time and my paperwork done---hardly what I'd call a satisfying day. It's frustrating when I can't give the kind of care that I take pride in because there's too many conflicting things going on at one time, like an admit and a post-op and a move-out from ICU who all come within minutes of each other, and I spend half the shift just trying to get caught up on paperwork and meds rather than actually taking care of the patient.
I cannot imagine for the life of me how some of you manage to take care of 7, 8, 9 or more patients........some days it's all I can do to keep up with four, while other days I could manage six, but certainly no more than that, and not without CNA assistance. It's relatively easy to deal with three or four on my own as long as they're not 2-person, total care pts......I can certainly do my own vitals, fingersticks and I&Os, but when I have a team which includes a LOL who needs to be pottied every half-hour, a diabetic who gets hourly blood sugars (we're now doing some insulin drips on the floor ), and a couple of 'close observation' patients, like the demented gentleman I had last week who'd get OOB and traipse down the hall naked if I turned my back on him for five minutes........well, it just makes for a really hard day.
So how DO those of you who take care of twice that many patients, or even more, do it? I like to think I'm a pretty decent nurse, but I get discouraged when I come home every night for an entire week feeling completely drained and hurting in places I didn't know I even had. It's time like these that I have to keep saying "I love my job, I love my job, I love my job", when I've actually had it up to here with my job and want nothing more than to run away to some faraway place where nobody knows I'm a nurse, where I don't hear my name called 15,000 times a day, where I don't get paged on my lunch break (when I can get one, that is), and where I don't have to explain HIPAA over and over again (don't people read the freakin' NEWSPAPER anymore??!).
OK, I feel better now. I really do love my work.......but once in a while, the job really sucks. :stone
), and a couple of 'close observation' patients, like the demented gentleman I had last week who'd get OOB and traipse down the hall naked if I turned my back on him for five minutes........well, it just makes for a really hard day.
I really do love my work.......but once in a while, the job really sucks. :stone