New leaf

Putting aside the fact that I haven't blogged since 2006, I'm going to try to write a nursing blog. You know, just the weird and crazy and funny stuff. I love the fact that the title of the blog, which I had created while working at the SIC in college, remains humorously appropriate.

I work on a medicine and oncology unit at a large, teaching, university-based medical center. We have 37 beds on the floor, and for at least a year now, we've been solidly full. This is both a good and bad thing. It means we keep our jobs in a shitty economy, but it also means that morale is slightly down, energy reserves are becoming diminished, and we're seeking sicker and sicker people. This, of course, creates more and more work. Were it not for my fantastic colleagues, I'd have been out of there months ago.

Today I worked an 8-hour shift, which is pretty abnormal for me--I usually work 3 12-hour shifts per week. I took care of four patients--two of whom I had taken care of yesterday. One of those patients is a man who has lung cancer that has spread to his liver. He came in with a high calcium level, which is common in cancer patients. Yesterday, he said a few things that didn't make much sense, but overall, was fine. Today, though, he told me we were in an oil tank that was about to explode and thought it was 1925. He'd already pulled out two IVs overnight and got up from bed by himself about 4 times in 30 minutes, even with the bed alarm on. This left me with only one choice--to restrain him. I strapped him down in a vest restraint that attaches to the bed to keep someone from getting up alone. Within 10 minutes, he was begging me to take it off. Not because he knew that I had tied him up, but because "I need to be able to get out of here if this place blows up!!"

The other patient is severely demented woman who spent a month of the geriatric psych unit for a month before coming to my floor to be ruled out for a stroke. The woman spends a few hours a day babbling on to herself. She doesn't make any sense, can't answer questions, and can't follow commands. She doesn't move herself at all, which means that part of my job is to turn her in bed every 2 hours to prevent the development of bed sores. In any case, with any type of care like this that involves touching her, she claws, swats, hits, and grabs at me while screaming obscenities. As long as you can avoid taking this kind of abuse personally and avoid injury, it becomes quite amusing.

Also on the floor were two other jewels. One is a very young man, in his early twenties, in the hospital with a sickle cell crisis. He keeps peeing in the bed and calling for the nurse to change it even though he is able to pee in a urinal, or in the plain old toilet. Now what kind of cognitively intact young man wets the bed?! Of course, his nurses are quite frustrated with him and have spoken pretty harshly to him in an attempt to change this behavior. Yesterday, a few of the techs went in to speak to him after we learned that this guy has a girlfriend. "Do you piss in the bed when you're sleeping with your girlfriend?!" No bed-wetting since.

Another man has threatened violence to the nurses a number of times since his admission. He's also told the nurses about a number of people he's going to "get" upon discharge. We've called security a few times, but this morning the nurse was ready to get the police involved. The patient told her he had a gun under his pillow. After a search by security though, no gun was found. At that point, he told her he would strangle her with some ace wraps.

Just another day at work...