This last week has been the absolute PITS at my workplace.......seems like they must be having a half-off admission sale for every practicing alcoholic and drug addict in the county. I've given more Lactulose and Ativan, cleaned up more vomit and diarrhea, used more restraints, and transferred more patients to the ICU in the past few days than I have in the past six months. As of last night, we had ten patients (out of 33 total) on my med/surg floor who are in various stages of withdrawal; our nine-bed ICU had four, and another one was on the way there as I was leaving for the night.
What's up with that??! We're all wondering if the holidays had some kind of mass depressive effect on the county's heroin and meth users, not to mention the ETOH'ers.........or maybe it was our unaccustomed snow and ice storms that kept everyone cooped inside for over a week and gave them a bizarre sort of cabin fever.
At any rate, most of us have never seen this many addicts at one time in our little hospital, and it seems no matter how many staff we have on the floor, it's not enough to deal with them. I can't even imagine working exclusively with this population; it's enough to make you spitting mad, and break your heart at the same time.
I've been caring for one 51-year-old heroin/ETOH addict who developed abscesses on both arms from skin-popping, bled out after her I & D, and is now on comfort care due to liver failure; I watched as the three daughters she walked out on some years ago came to her bedside yesterday to say good-bye and to tell her they forgave her for abandoning them. I felt awful for all of them, and yet angry with the patient for having put her children through hell and thrown away her own life with both hands, all because of the damned drugs. Then I thought, as I always do, of how there but for the grace of God go I......yes, my drug of choice was the legal kind, but no less devastating to body and soul.
At any rate, I think we all will be glad when our patient population returns to the usual: confused elderly, surgical patients, diabetics, and COPD'ers.
Have any of you who work in hospitals experienced a rise in the number of drug-addicted patients on your floors since the holidays? How are you coping with it, and is your administration staffing accordingly? We're fortunate in that ours has consistently OVERstaffed us when we have these high-acuity patients, but there are times you could put 20 people out there and it wouldn't be enough.......they are an enormous challenge, and they drain our energies faster than even the combative, confused, ambulatory dementia patients.
