Scanner Guns

It's not easy being in the hospital. The patient woke up just in time to see me standing over him, pointing a gun in his direction. He shrieked. That startled me and caused me to also shriek. We were in a stand-off. I hate it when I get caught pointing a gun at a patient.

All I was trying to do is scan the bar code on his wrist band without waking him, but the dang scanner makes a beeping sound. I'm never sure if I should first wake the patient to warn him what I'm about to do or just do it and hope that he sleeps through the beep. Or, perhaps they should design the scanners to look less like guns.

Shaken

I'm trying to calm down. I was minding my own business, busy making a smoothie, when I was suddenly pushed up and to the side. I grabbed the counter to maintain my balance. At first, I thought that I was sick and perhaps having a stroke. Then as the rolling continued, it occurred to me that this was an earthquake.

Calling to the dogs, I walked out the door to the backyard. The dogs followed. We were safe. Tommy looked at me and whined. I'm whining in Blog form. I wish I could call in sick today, just in case it is a pre-curser to a bigger quake. The preliminary number is a 5.8. EEEK!

What Recession?

Sarah has a new set of wheels. In the process of demonstrating what the car could do, she scared me. My arms were stretched out in front of me and I was braking the imaginary brake as hard as I could. I knew how I was going to die and it was going to be in a porsche. Fianlly, she took pity on me and slowed down. Now I know how other people feel when I'm doing the driving.

Beach Day

I can body surf without a board, but it is so much easier with one. In my teens, the only thing I needed to ride the waves was a bikini. Now, I like a wetsuit and a boogie board. I'm warmer, get better rides and no longer have to frantically pull my bikini back on after a wipe out.



That is me above. The picture is dark because my latest camera broke after a tiny fall, so I have gone back to my first digital camera. I have forgotten how to use it properly and couldn't find a back-light setting like what was on the camera that broke before the last camera that broke. I'm beginning to think that butter-fingered people shouldn't own digital cameras.

The riptides didn't amount to much, so the lifeguard boat didn't need to scoop anyone out of the water. In a way, it was a shame. A good riptide day can provide hours of entertainment.

The people on the little red vehicles are Sheriff's deputies. Their job appears to be driving up and down the beach and writing tickets to people caught drinking alcohol. I'm guessing that drinking tickets are a major source of revenue, otherwise, Los Angeles County would prominently post the rules where people could actually see them. None of the people I saw who were busted had made any attempt to hide their beverages. Openly drinking bottles of beer indicates that they had no idea that drinking is prohibited on the beach.

The sea gulls must be tired of just eating live fish from the ocean. They are quite aggressive when it comes to stealing food. I don't really blame them. If it was a choice between raw fish and stolen fried chicken, I would become a thief also.

Money Trap

It didn't seem possible, but things have gotten worse at work. Our nurse's aide fell and broke his arm while trying to keep a patient from falling. The patient is fine, but our aide will be gone for six to eight weeks. If his contract is like ours, he will get full pay while he recovers.

The problem we are having is that management will not replace him. Other aides have asked to work for him; it is not a problem to find a temporary replacement, but they won't replace him. For the last quarter, we are nine million dollars over budget.

In the meantime, the nurses are at the breaking point. Nurses are working a couple of hours extra on overtime a day to catch up with the charting. The new computer charting and scanning devices are a royal pain and even the I.T. people are struggling to make them work.

Plus, now that the unit secretaries aren't entering orders for us, they keep wandering off. Answering the phone, which I really hate to do, takes up a ridiculous amount of my time. What time I have left is spent answering call lights and cleaning up whatever bodily fluids or solids I come across. Oh, and apologizing is time consuming as well. Every time I hear that someone is unhappy, whether it is a patient or a nurse, I have to listen to them vent and then apologize.

Many of the nurses work two jobs, so I have been asking them about their other jobs to see if I might be happier elsewhere. All of the nurses like their other jobs better, but they work here because of the money and benefits. I think I know why we are over budget. No other hospital even comes close to paying what we are paid.

The next best paying hospital in the area is U.C.L.A., but their base pay for me would be about eight dollars less an hour. That is sixteen thousand dollars less a year. Plus, nurses have to pay nine dollars a day to park and their health insurance and care isn't free like ours. They do have support staff, though. They pay people to answer the phone and answer call lights, so the nurses can actually take care of their patients.

I never complain, but others have been told by management that if they are unhappy, they know where the door is. It is so tempting to go through that door and take as many people as possible with me, preferably all on the same day. I fantasize about taking all of my coworkers to job interviews with me, all getting hired elsewhere and leaving on the same day in a mass exodus. But who wants to take that kind of pay cut?

So, anyway, that is why I haven't blogged much lately. Who wants to listen to people complain?

Yogurt Thief

I am tired of being a victim. It is time to go on the offensive and make a victim out of the perpetrator. The yogurt thief must be stopped.

Everyday, I take two cartons of yogurt to work and leave them in the fridge. Once or twice a week, one or both cartons disappear. It doesn't matter if I seal them in a bag or leave them loose. The thief is relentless.

I want to put something icky in a carton and wait for the thief to take the bait. I don't want to actually kill the thief, diarrhea would be sufficient. Ex Lax would probably do the trick. Or maybe I could put something horrible at the bottom of a container, like some dog doo.

What do you think? How can I keep my yogurt safe?

Doctor Lies

The new computer system is not just driving the nurses crazy. The doctors hate it as much as we do. They have to enter all of their orders into the system. To avoid doing this, some are calling the nurses and lying about where they are in order to get the nurses to do the work for them.

If the doctor is calling from home or is in the middle of surgery, of course we will enter the orders. But when they are calling from their office inside the hospital and say they are not near a computer, we know they are lying. Perhaps they are not aware that the phone identifies exactly where they are calling from.

I'm too nice to tell the doctor that I know for a fact that a computer is sitting right in front of him. I just do the work for him.

Some of the patients are staying longer because the doctors don't know how to discharge them. One patient walked out without any discharge instructions at all. Others have had to stay an extra day to be properly discharged. This must be costing a fortune. The software alone, cost over a billion dollars. I wonder what the learning curve is going to cost on top of that?

On top of that, the scanners we are using to scan patient's armbands and medications are being a royal pain. We have been told that if we scan closer to the doorway, they will scan better. It is annoying, but we can walk over to the doorway to scan the meds, but what about the patients? Do they think we are going to roll the patient's beds to the doorway every time we want to give them a medication?

I'm counting the years until retirement.

More Work Woes

It was chaos. We have gone paperless at work and the class to teach us the new system sucked. We didn't know that until we got to actually use the new system. It is nothing like the "playground" we trained on. The general stress level at work is high, bordering on the same level of insanity as when we opened the hospital. Why can't they leave us alone and stop forcing new technology on us?

We do have tech support hanging around, which is a good thing. Otherwise, we would just quit our jobs and run from the building. But, they are not nurses and don't fully understand what we need to do. For some of our questions, we just get a glassy stare in response. If the computer guys can't do everything on the computer that has to be done, what hope do we have?



There are some major, even life threatening glitches in the computer system. For example, all of the medication orders state that the medications start now, even though some should not start until the next day. If it is not fixed soon, patients will be overdosing or bleeding out.



We also are now scanning patients as though they are going through a check stand. I suppose it creates an added level of safety to scan the patients, but I feel like I'm a store checker and the patients must feel like groceries. Maybe if we can get the scanners to work, it will work out. I don't know.

It just takes so long to do the smallest task. They promised us that they were going to empty the hospital for a few days when we went paperless, but instead, they filled us up. Each nurse is going to have hours of overtime and I predict the heavy use of sick time soon.

Law is looking better all the time.

My Big Brother

My big brother passed away early this morning from a massive stroke. I can't believe that I will never see him again.

He is survived by his wife, five step-children, our parents, brother and assorted dogs, cats, a squirrel and large reptile things. He loved air planes, Porches and travel. He served in the Air Force, was an L.A.P.D. officer and later a flight engineer.

Diabetes robbed him of his sight a few years ago. He was still tall and handsome, though, and managed to meet and marry an angel, despite his blindness. I will always be grateful to his lovely wife for taking caring of him these past difficult years.

Recently, he had become dependent upon dialysis to keep him alive. His health was steadily getting worse. On top of everything else, my brother had just been diagnosed with a tumor requiring major surgery. The stroke occurred first and was perhaps a blessing. He didn't suffer. As a nurse, I've seen some bad, agonizing deaths. My brother was fortunate. He slipped into a coma and peacefully passed away.

My sweet Golden Retriever, Kelsey, who died a few months ago, was crazy about my brother. I imagine Kelsey greeting my brother with sloppy, wet kisses and leading him to a better place. Please let it be so.