shopgal

I am an LPN on a LTC Vent unit and when I started my job I was married, not happily, I had just found out that my husband was cheating while I was at work. I went through the seperation and then it was like a meat market with all of these single guys. I was like pretty anti-man at the time and just getting used to the flow of my job and totally distraut over the end of my marriage. I became friends with one of the Respiratory Therapists that I worked with, he had been through a divorce too and we really had a lot in common. We pretty much just clicked. He was a single dad and when his dad suffered a massive heart attack he didn't have a baby-sitter for his son when he worked and those nights just happened to be when I was off. So I got to know his son and then we started dating and we've been together for almost 2 years now and it's wonderful. My ex never understood or cared to understand my job and didn't understand why I would be so tired and frazled after work and it's great to have someone who knows what it's like to lose a pt after you've coded for an hour on someone you've taken care of for a year and gotten to know their family. We remain very professional on the job and most people didn't even know that we were a couple.

My Uncle passed away from "complications from pick's disease" and it was 5 years after he was diagnosed and he was 54 at time of diagnosis. It was like the confussion of Alzheimer's and then with neurological problams like he would want to pick up his foot to walk and he would get "stuck" like the motor nerves weren't working or something. Anyway, I'm sorry to hear about her diagnosis it's one of those brain diseases that are so sad.

I am always in charge of the cooking for every holiday and get together which I love, but I always just try to cut little corners with the things we all love to eat. I use skim milk and low fat cheese and I can't believe it's not butter in all of my cooking. Then for the desserts I use low fat creamcheese and mix the sugar with the splenda and all of that so then you can cut a few calories here and there and I just don't tell anyone 90% of the time they can't tell the difference. It still all tastes good.

A friend of mine calls hers her "Lucy" and when I was younger, we were taught that it was your "do-do" whether you were male or female and so for awhile when I was little I thought that we were all the same because everyone had a "do-do" On Sex and the City, Charolotte calls hers her "Rebecca" and her husband calls his his "Schooner" or "John Thomas" I thought that was pretty funny. My husband calls his "Coach" :chuckle

Before I became a nurse, I was a pharmacy tech and we had a drug seeking mother and her son amazingly enough had all of these ailments that she needed to come and pick up meds for him and we always knew that they were for her because she was higher than a kite when she came in, but she must have loved his Ritilan because that was the one that was always mysteriously misplaced, my favorite line was that "they were in the car and the car got so hot that they melted together and she tried to piece them back together into pills, but they magically disinigrated into thin air" this was when we asked her to bring in the "mass of melted pills" Can you say Munchousen's Syndrome?

Well done to the noc shifters! Better yet, our meetings are scheduled at 1:30pm.. always. I quit going, I keep saying that when I work from 7p-7a, no meeting is mandatory at 1:30 in the afternoon. :zzzzz My other favorite thing is when you walk into one of your g-tube pts rooms and the bottle is dry and off and who knows how long it's been that way, and did I mention that this pt is a diabetic? I also love it when I get to follow the CNAs on rounds and take all of the pt's IV and g-tube tubing out from under them. I've worked with these people for a year with the same problem, it's not rocket science, you'd think that after about the 2,000th time we'd figure it out. I love it when people don't have the common courtesy to actually call in, they just don't show up and then, oh look, they still have a job here! :flamesonb Don't you love health care, no other profession for me!

One of my instructors told me to give up the 4.0 idea because nursing programs are so compact that you need to just concentrate on one or two classes and get the As in those to keep your GPA up and settle for the Bs or Cs for the others and so I got my As in clinicals and to do that there was no way that I could spend the time that it required to get As in the other classes. But I'm one of those people who has to study so hard for my grades, they don't just come to me like they do for other people.

I work 7p-7a and I get out of there between 7:30-8:00am if I am pretty well prepared and start my last med pass on time and don't have any major catastrophes. I have worked noc shift for years and the only thing that is bad and this is in every facility that I have ever worked in, they think that you sit around all night and read magazines with your feet up eating bon-bons. I get a lot of the heavy treatments put on my shift and they always put a lot of meds and IVABTs on noc shift because they think that we have nothing better to do. I counted my midnight med pass the other night and I have more meds than the 8am med pass. I am so busy that I hardly ever take a break or sit down. You have less help at night and more pts so you have to be on top of your game. I hope that they don't pile a lot on you just because you are on nights. Another thing that I have to deal with at night is all of the day shift call-ins and then you are stuck with staffing because there's no administration there and our adminstration will never answer their phone so there's no use calling them if there's a problem. Good luck to you!

Yeah, our protocol is no more than 30 min before infusion and then a 30 min to 1 hour window after infusion. We always draw them 72 hours after the initial dose.

Oh yeah, the one that still grosses me out is the dying cancer pt smell, that one gets me still. The other one that causes me to step back is the smell of when you have to burp a g-tube and they have like a lot of air and it goes and goes and you're like standing there and you can't leave, you have to just stand there, :barf01:

Spit and sputum used to just make me gag and want to ralph, so where do I work, Long term ventilator unit! Now I could care less! We have all of these pts that have signed waivers that they know that they aspirate everything but they don't want to give up food, so anyway, you've never seen gross until you've seen a pt aspirate a taco or ice cream and then we get to suction it out of their lungs and then not only that but then it bubbles up around their trach, yum, Taco Bell anyone? Give me c-diff poop any day, puke on me, lather me with your wound juice, doesn't bother me a bit, but aspirated tacos were pretty nasty!

I used to work in a nsg home that had a new part that was only like 4 yrs old and the old part that we called the "getto" that was about 40 yrs old. Wierd stuff always happened in the getto part. Like we had a pt that was dying and we had gone in to clean up the room after the family had left for the night and there was a chair that I specifically remember putting against the wall on the other side of the room and every time that we came back the chair was up next to the bed like someone was sitting with her. Another thing that happened at that place was there were two comatose pts in the same room at the end of the hall and one noc, their call light kept going on. I kept going in and shutting it off thinking that there was a short or something. I took the nurse down with me to show her that there was nothing going on in the room and then after a couple more times the nurse came back down with me again and the pt had a fiberoptic angel on her top shelf and it just came on by itself and we were like, there must really be a short and the nurse went to unplug it in case of a fire hazard and it wasn't plugged in, no lie.

I am well versed in C-diff, it seems like all of our pts come back from the hosp with it and then if they have it, no matter how many times we explain handwashing and contact isolation to the CNAs, magically, the roommate always ends up with it. As my co-worker always says, "That room smells like the bottom of a litter box," I think that she is right. It is usually mucusy and yellowish, sometimes olive green, more of a sweet smell, is your stomach turning yet? But yes, once you've smelled it, you will always recognize it, bring on the flagyl and vanco! (and rifampin if you're lucky!) :chuckle

I was married to a man who's career was nothing medical and it was so hard to talk to him because he didn't care when I would come home and be so drained from having a pt die or a really stressful night. He totally didn't understand and didn't care to. I am divorced and am with a respiratory therapist now and it's great because we understand eachother. We both work 12-hour nights. It works out great for both of us.

I worked in LTC as a CNA for several years and now as a nurse, I work on a long term vent unit. My pts in LTC it was hard, but I could say, "Well, they were old and lived their lives" and be happy for them, etc. To say that it was ever easy, no. But now most of my pts are fairly young and it is harder, I have cried with families and I don't think that it's always a bad thing, we are after all human. I just try to be happy for them that the suffering is over. I think that the day that it gets easy is the day that I need to find a new career.