a time to rest

ahhhhhhh. i'm on a few days off now. i can rest and rejuvenate. i took a nice, slow, casual walk today. lately, i have been checking out how other people have landscaped their yards, trying to figure out what we're going to do this summer. according to google maps my walk was approximately 1.39295 km or 27.8590 olympic swimming pool lengths. that's 818.420 smoots.

i don't have many stories from work this week to share with you that are very positive. i had an extremely heavy patient load. yesterday, for example, i only started my charting after 10.5 hours of my shift had gone by. between hanging the almost-hourly iv meds for a patient experiencing an amazing amount of pain and other unpleasant symptoms, to getting pills crushed and a tube feed flowing for another person, to running to someone else experiencing occasional episodes of being extremely short of breath and he needed me NOW, checking blood sugar levels before meals - not too far before because you don't want to give them their hypoglycemic meds too early and cause their blood sugar to drop before they eat, but not too late that they're already eating by the time you check their sugars - to running back to that tube feed to flush it with water - to hanging the next iv med - and trying not to feel guilty about not spending more time with that other patient in the next room who is sort of nervous about his illness. and sorry to the little old lady who didn't get her dressing changed - i hope your nurse had time to do it today.

in the late afternoon, my boss comes up to me and tells me that one of my patients needs to get an iv infusion of some med that i've never heard of. "we need to wait till the dr. gets here, because he needs to be here during the initial test infusion." she says and then casually adds,"and i'm not sure if he needs to be cardiac monitored while we do it." wha-? what kind of drug is this?? it's clear to me that before i give this stuff i'm gonna need to do a bit of research. at this point i sorta lost it and told her that i couldn't do it right now. i couldn't handle everything that was going on. she asked me if i was okay, which put me over the edge and i had to just walk away and hide in the clean supply room for a few minutes as i unsuccessfully fought against the tears burning my eyes.

just too much.

another nurse did that crazy drug infusion for me. and someone else got my tube feed started for me at supper. my patients settled down eventually and i had 1.5 hours to get my charting done and catch up on other stuff that had been neglected all day. i work with a great staff. we really try to work as a team and for that, i am grateful. if it wasn't for the staff i work with, i'm pretty sure i would have found a new job by now.

ahhhhh. now i can rest.