Happy Fat Tuesday
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Everyday is an adventure, or misadventure as the case may be. It is the latter that makes for the best stories, inspiring the name of my blog. I'm a nurse and an attorney (and way too silly sometimes). I am retired now. WELCOME to my blog! This is a work of fiction inspired by true events. The patients I refer to are a patchwork quilt of various patient's problems mixed together. If you think you recognize someone, you are wrong. These people do not really exist.
In order to access the oxygen lines in the walls, there needs to be a flow meter stuck in the wall. We don't have enough to go around, so decisions have to be made about who needs oxygen more, so that the flow meter can be taken from those who don't need it as much. Flow meters can't be that expensive and we've complained about this for years, but we're always short.
I'm stuck on a committee whose function is to find problems and fix them. I chose the lack of flow meters as my next project. It's not enough to have an idea, it's also necessary to come up with a model or prototype to demonstrate your idea. The photo shows the cyanotic bear. I made a nasal canula out of pipe cleaners and put it on the bear. My explanation was that we have a lot of bears in the unit who don't have oxygen when they need it. (When I went up the elevator with my bear and silly putty flow meter, a man kept staring at me like I was crazy. I am, but that's beside the point.)
I found out whose job it is to order such things, so if she doesn't buy them, my next step is to go over her head. This person is also my boss. Is it too late to choose another project?
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1. I was so poor growing up ... if I wasn't a boy . I'd have had nothing to play with.
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Thanks, Sarah.
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This is someone's idea of dessert. It's kind of pretty isn't it? It looks like balls of sorbet. What it is, is puto. The ingredients are rice, water, sugar and food coloring. No one offered me any so I can't describe the taste, but it looked and smelled like gooey rice balls. (Is it okay to sniff, photograph and post pictures of people's food without their knowledge?)
Later, we were given cupcakes by a patient's family. The nurses who enjoyed puto, wrinkled their noses at the offer of cupcakes. That meant more cake for me. I think that things worked just fine.
I overheard a coworker asking for a foot plate. I had never heard of this, but I figured it was some kind of orthopedic device. Later it was delivered. It was a fruit plate. It might be time to get my hearing checked.
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It's not a new idea, but it's believed by some that putting an orange dot next to patient's names will prevent falls. This idea is based on the premise that patients fall because nurses are too stupid to know which patients are at a high risk for falls and so need a dot to alert them.
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We're not allowed to drink at the nursing station, so I had my tea hidden behind the computer. A coworker moved the screen causing the cup to tip over on to a stack of patient documents. We dried the pages the best we could, but they were crinkled and yellowish. If anyone asks, the official story is that there was a urine spill. Heaven forbid that anyone find out it's tea.
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I could go into a long, drawn-out tirade into all of the reasons why I'm so pissed, but I'm going to exercise restraint and limit myself to a rant on only one of the things that pissed me off last night. The subject is patient bed assignments. Excited? I knew you would be.
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You may want to pass this along to your son and brothers; I guess this is a big issue. Many females use a date rape drug on the market called "Beer." The drug is found in liquid form and is available anywhere. It comes in bottles, cans, from taps and in large "kegs". Beer is used by female sexual predators at parties and bars to persuade their male victims to go home and have sex with them.
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Consider These 3 Thoughts:
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Our union contract guarantees us a certain number of paid days off per year. All we have to do is give 14 days notice and we have the day off, no questions asked. Because those who know best have not gotten around to replacing the nurses we have lost in the last year, we are working seriously short-staffed. As a result, all time off requests are being denied, in violation of our contract.
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At the beginning of the shift, the previous nurse told me that she put a polar bear on the patient's knee. I said okay and managed not to laugh. Nurses who don't speak English as a first language say the cutest things. What she meant to say is polar care, which is a type of ice pack treatment. Polar bears are cuter than polar cares, but I think a bear would keep the patient warm instead of cold.
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Overzealous zookeeper Friedrich Riesfeldt (Paderborn, Germany) fed his constipated elephant Stefan 22 doses of animal laxative and more than a bushel of berries, figs and prunes before the plugged-up pachyderm finally let it fly, and suffocated the keeper under 200 pounds of poop!
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We're trying to get rid of a patient who just needs custodial care. The problem is that no facility will take him. One facility did express an interest in him until they saw his transfer summary with 21 major diagnoses. Most patients have one or two. Our solution was to re-write the summary and pare it down to a more manageable 5.
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Those of you who live in the snow aren't going to be impressed, or even sympathetic, but it's cold here. The good news is that it's raining and the snow level is dropping. About another 5 degrees lower and it will snow here. If that happens, the freeways will be closed and I won't be going to work tomorrow. It's a long-shot, but I can still hope.
It's also getting dirty at work. I pulled out a table and wrote a message for housekeeping in the dust.
Under another table at the nursing station, I found gum. Unfortunately, my fingers found it first. Nurses can be such pigs. Can you believe that this is a hospital?
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I saw these shoes in a magazine and think that they would be perfect for all of the employees here. They look soft, comfy and no patient can complain that they weren't warned.
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WARNING TO ALL WOMEN!!
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I bought a new foundation garment and wore it for the first time to work today. After a couple of hours, I couldn't stand it anymore. It felt like some medieval instrument of torture with wires digging into my rib cage. No matter how much I tugged, and I tugged plenty, reaching under my top to rearrange things, the wires just kept digging in deeper.
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