As I've posted on these boards previously, I am a recent grad working nights in emergency at a hospital in the Detroit suburbs. I was recommended to the position by one of my old clinical instructors, who works as a night-shift case manager in this department when she isn't teaching. We had had a very good working relationship in clinical, and still do as colleagues in the EC.
There's just one slight problem. I'm a very calm, collected and generally squared-away individual. Instructor was a stand-up comedian in college. A few other nurses got in on the gag, and thus began the Great EC Prank War; or, Why Working With People You Know Can Backfire...
* Finding rubber vermin on one's charting computer. Always a classic.
* Explaining to patients that it's perfectly normal for their nurse to get prank calls from EC Care Management on the SpectraLink. "I'm reviewing a case you worked on... do you happen to know why exactly the MD ordered a Foley for this patient Mr. P. Freely?"
* Getting one's shirt-tail yanked out while working with hall patients. The nurse who did it ran down the hall yelling "Dweeb!", while the patient (a little old lady with abdominal pain) cracked up laughing.
* Invited to the Care Management office to "hang out with your old school peeps." Instructor had brought in a box of Peeps candies.
* Hiding a stuffed monkey in a fake tree outside the charge nurse office. Charge nurse looked through the window, saw the monkey and cracked up.
* Finding a "Go Buckeyes" sticker on my U of M Alumni coffee mug. Got the perp back by hiding a musical button programmed with "The Victors" under one of his patient charts.
Surely mine isn't the only unit with this kind of tradition. Go ahead and write 'em in!
...sometimes you need to have a sense of humor to keep from going off the deep end, especially now with insufficient staffing. On slow nights you can only do so much stocking and cleaning and charting, especially if your patients are taken care of.
On slow nights, we were floated elsewhere, or sent home if the shift was more than half over..
Specializes in Emergency, Critical Care (CEN, CCRN).
More SpectraLink fun from the last few nights: Apparently our ECPs got a poor introduction to the workings of the SpectraLink 8020, as one of the docs stopped me at the desk the night before last to ask me how one would pick up an alpha page. His phone was showing the first 36 characters of the message, but not scrolling. After I demonstrated the proper page-answer procedure, he discovered to his amusement that the techs had been sending him increasingly hilarious "patient updates" all night long, and he hadn't been reading them in their entirety. "Pt in rm 404 Green is nudist, refuses gown, pls advise... fam of rm 210 w/t perf 'healing ritual,' req sharp knife & live chicken..."
Lamaze: In my hospital, EC is one of the few places where staff generally don't get sent home or floated, and the rationale behind that is that you can't predict emergencies - thirty minutes from now, a flood of resus could be hitting the doors, and that would create an unsafe situation while we either recalled nurses from home or pulled them from elsewhere in the hospital. People might be scheduled short shifts (there's a 1900-0300 cadre that comes on with us, and then the peds team closes at 0300, so we lose about half a dozen nurses right there), but they won't be sent home unless we're absolutely dead. As a result, people usually start pranking each other right around 0200 - pretty much all the patients are examined, tested, resulted and dispo'd, the short-shifters are finishing charting and/or killing their last hour, and everyone else is trying to catch a second wind.
Not once has our collective sense of humor affected our ability to care for patients. We do an excellent job of assessing and treating people safely, effectively and rapidly, and if we have fun doing it, so much the better. (Heck, some of the patients even get in on it - at least once a month, we get a young EtOHer brought by friends, who said friends treat the excursion as a continuation of the events that prompted the EtOH admit. They'll order pizza, fire up the iPods, start a party in the waiting room. I spent twenty minutes in one such room conducting nursing education on the cardiotoxicity of vodka and Red Bull, and had them all laughing their pants off. I figure if they remember to stay away from that stuff, I've done my good deed for the night.)
Lamazeteacher, variety is the spice of life. Some people just don't have a sense of humor, some people use humor as a stress releiver, me? I'm just a class clown that refuses to grow up.
It's a relief to hear from someone who, while having a sense of humor, is serious about the work that needs to be done.
It seems that your facility is quite large (WOW! a peds team of 6!), and possibly aligned with a medical school. I was impressed by your spontaneous education of the ETOHers. I was under the impression that learning didn't happen while partying, and hope with you, that some retention of information occurred. I'd imagine that being in the hospital gets them away from the law, as they'd not be treated as well when "drunk in public" charges were filed. I've always thought alcoholism is a disease that requires treatment outside of jail.
I know that ambulance dispatchers notify appropriate hospital EDs (what's EC?) when multiple cases will be coming in, which would provide the needed time for staff who floated out, to come back; and give a few of those who went home, a heads up (where I worked, they were "on call" if sent home).
Whenever stress is high, comic relief is needed, but I've always believed that it is best done, when off duty, and not at the expense of others.
Worked ER all my life as a way to buy lottery tickets in hopes that someday I wont need to work ER anymore. The rules on those things are impossible! I noticed that at the bottom they all say "void where prohibited," so I did. You know, the cops have a completely differant term for it! Public lewdness or something. I don't even know what a lewd is. Wouldn't recognise one if I tripped over it. Didn't help me win the lottery though. In fact the judge made me give him some money so he could go buy tickets, I guess.
Lamazeteacher, variety is the spice of life. Some people just don't have a sense of humor, some people use humor as a stress releiver, me? I'm just a class clown that refuses to grow up.
Death fighter (dthfytr):
You're also a believer in "e" before "i", except after "c"....... (the reverse is true); and I'd imagine that you are a pretty good ER nurse. Humor makes one a good teacher, which you could be. I'd say that you know when to be in the "child" role, and when the "adult" role is more appropriate (from Eric Berne's "Games People Play/Transactional Analysis).
I remember an OB nurse at a Kaiser Hospitalin Santa Rosa, CA who did find out that she'd won over $100,000,000 in the lottery, one evening, and she went to work that night as usual. When she was asked by a newspaper reporter, why she did that, she said pragmatically, "I wouldn't want my coworkers to be short handed, and I'll probably work until they find a replacement for me, or I decide to continue working because I love being a nurse". She eventually quit, and I heard that she went on to do charitable acts, buying layettes for poor single mothers.....
where does one even get a rubber chicken, I wonder? lol
I'm the nurse who will deadpan at patients (the only reason I don't want fall risk pts out of bed without assist is b/c of the paperwork, of course. lol. I usually get a quick double look and a laugh for that one) and will start singing for no particular reason or b/c something someone says makes me think of a song.
Just not overly clever about practical jokes, though. Guess we all have our gifts. Heaven knows that we need all kinds in this job.
I know where I'D go to get a rubber chicken...my mother has one that ends up in the WMS Gilbert & Sullivan show every year, in the peddler's basket or in a soldier's hand instead of a rifle, that sort of thing. This year (the show was Iolanthe), the Lord Chancellor was out hunting and pointed his shotgun at the wings stage right...sure enough, someone backstage tossed out the rubber chicken! I have no idea WHY rubber chickens are so funny, they just are.
A+ on the analysis (or is it anal lysis?), but you still need to work on the humor thing. I'd bet you don't even have a rubber chicken.
What? You didn't think the "e" before "i" thing was funny?
As a childbirth educator for 35 years, my students usually refer to their heightened enjoyment of what could have been a deadly dull subject for them, as due to my humorous additions to the content. My favorite thing, is to immitate a "stiff upper lip" type British Childbirth Educator, Sheila Kittzinger, who demonstrated how orangatans give birth on the run at an OB conference in San Diego, CA many years ago. It's done with tremendous rocking of hips, with a wobble. Reporters and videographers from local news stations were falling down laughing, as were the participants of that conference.
I prefer comedy that is self depricating, to pranks which make others look silly.
Face it, hospital humor is vile. Just the various uses of KY alone would put a civilian off his feed for months.
Finding a coworker on nights who has nodded off meant taping him or her into the chair and wheeling the whole business into the elevator for a trip down to the basement. Alone.
Mechanical Halloween toys left in trays of instruments for newbie aides to clean are fun, too.
Sneaking up behind somebody who is bending over with a Velcro blood pressure cuff and ripping apart the velcro is good for a quick standup and panicked feel of the scrub seams.
Water fights on unit can be the stuff of legend, especially when they culminate in ICU tar and feathers: D-50 topped with talcum powder.
lamazeteacher
2,170 Posts
On slow nights, we were floated elsewhere, or sent home if the shift was more than half over..