The story of my day

I have always liked words. The dictionary was my friend as a kid. I always liked to look up obscure words so I could use them in my spelling sentences....when I had to do them (I got out of this homework frequently through some other endeavors...)

As I finally got a minute last shift to start documenting, I thought about what was really happening and a couple of words came to mind.

While I ran myself hither and yon the first four hours, I really wasn't idle (my first word), but I'd suspect some of the chitchat here and there was. As I'm running around, I don't mind speed chatting or bantering with the patients as I hang all of my patients IVs for the shift. My night--come in, run an IV, stop, flush, run another IV of Vancomycin, stop, flush, hold and run another IV, and so on, like a bad TV commercial. I can't get too in-depth.

Unfortunately, sometimes oncoming report is a little too idle. We have some nurses who will give you the new orders list (we write one as we take things off) and your report the same way every time and it's complete. A couple of our people are new and they still haven't learned how to give report, so they tend to engage in idle chatter and miss the big stuff. Like the blood cultures ordered three hours before end-of-shift that have to be done today or the 102 temp that the patient getting blood just spiked near the end of his transfusion, or the report on the patient who returned from acute. It wasn't a big deal for anyone else, but it was for me, since I was his nurse.

Eventually, the last four hours drifted into the idyll category. Our neighborhood isn't exactly pastoral, but sometimes, it is pretty, just before dark, and this night, it was exceptional. The sky was a pinkish-red that glowed as the sun set. I only noticed it because I had a minute to look out the window when I called my husband. It made me think of that old saying, "Red at night, sailor's delight." My patients, including the returning one, were quiet and happy. They got all their nightly pills and drifted off to sleep. The only thing that broke the idyll was a fever in another patient, which required an all-hands fire drill to get all the labs pulled before the oncoming shift came.

So we left our coworkers with an idle, idyllic moment of their own, with sleeping patients, as we walked out the door into the cool of midnight.

More later...