Best laid plans

Oh, it wasn't Monday, it was the day after a holiday and I could tell. People who were gone all week this week are buried on their return to the Hotel. (Yes, vacation is nice, and so is having that extra day until you return).

I hoped to get one of our patients set up for a clinic visit. I was greeted by the gentleman who waters the plants in my temporary home. "Don't get him upset" was what one of my coworkers said.

It's nice to know the volunteers rate higher than the actual employees here. Did I want to be in "his space"? No. Do I work here? Yes. Do I rate higher as an employee trying to do my job in a temporary location? I should! I take care of ALL my assigned patients, not just the plant guy.

Unfortunately, I'm not the only refugee in the building. Our boss has decided to move one of my cohorts, too. He/she is not happy.

To top off my day, I was working with a patient and found out he got his new stuff from the Hotel to work with us. He just needed to download one little thing. We also found out (in doing our test) that the one little thing was discontinued...on Labor Day. Ugh! Glad he can use his adaptive equipment in other ways, just not for what we intended.

Time to go to Plan B....stay tuned.

How you know it's Monday

Signs in the Hotel that it's Monday.

1. Patients are moving around. Can you say bed bingo? No one is where you expect them. I really wish Santa would have brought us private rooms instead of so many doubles (thank goodness triples fell out of vogue).

2. Coworkers get flat tires. Not one, but two of them. Craziness.

3. It rains yet again. I don't care if it's knee high by Saturday, it will get mowed when I don't have to go to work the next day.

4. You find things you don't need to see (or hear about) in the office photo copier, especially things that are not yours.

On we go with the rest of the week. Stay tuned.

Saturday special

Oh, adventures with Bubba are never dull. It's fun for a tween boy  if...

1. You can make $40 moving boxes with Dad before 9AM. Dahey and Bubba were helping a friend (along with some big, burly guys Dahey works with) clean out his house and move.

2. You can laugh hysterically at the talking birthday cards in the store.

3. You get to hang out with one of your buddies (and 12 other boys from school) at the local laser tag adventure place, shoot hoops, and generally act silly.

4. You get pizza and you convince your mother to take you to a place that still may have an old fashioned cake donut at 6PM. (and it's not the local donut shop seen on TV either, 'cause they closed at noon).

My weekends are never dull.

While I wait

It only seems as if you are doing something when you're worrying.  ~Lucy Maud Montgomery

So consequently, I'm going to do nothing while waiting for my new position, even if I'm asked a million times about it. According to the boss, the chief of nursing will be instituting a staffing freeze.

No one gets in, out or moved around in any nursing areas until further notice. Nice.

Boring start? Not!

Oh, it's always fun when your day starts slow and gets really, really fast. I get ready to start the day getting patients up and around. It's easy with the first patient, set up, go then come back.

When I got to the next patient, and all set up, the boss tells me they just got an appointment for the patient to leave the unit for a test. Nice. Back to putting the patient on a stretcher, calling transport and away we go.

Next, I move another patient out to our lounge to watch TV as the housekeepers clean and wax the floors.

After that comes lunch, visitors and the end of the day. If I would have blinked, I would have missed it.

Stay tuned!

If they asked me...

I'd tell them what I thought about renovating our end of the Hotel. Alas, Manglement always thinks they know better.

If they really do renovate, it will be more of the same, with newer stuff, and hopefully, more private rooms. I'd love to get out of the moving business.

Learning is so much fun

When you're out with the journal club, with good food and good companions. And I so loved the chocolate hazelnut bars for dessert....yum!

Gotta keep the tummy happy to keep learning!

So happy I got to escape after a day of moving furniture and soothing uneasy souls at the Hotel. I love admissions and getting psych consults. At least, I had a trainee on the admission to help out. I think she's got it and will make a fine admissions nurse.

Stay tuned...

Comings and goings

Sit still long enough on our unit and talk to a few people and you'll find out a lot of things in a short amount of time.

One of our long-time nurses is heading to one of Washington's outpatient clinics. He/she finally decided to go back to work full-time, after a long time part-time. The economy sure changes things, as well as our big boss.

Another nurse and his family will be packing up the homestead this summer to head on out to a new location out of state. The unit is sad he's going, but he and family are excited.

And suddenly, one of the newer nurses will have a position on our unit, since we have comings and goings.

It all falls into place sooner or later.

The boss told me yesterday to enjoy the holidays this year, so since I'm in the SU, I'll be able to take vacation days whenever the staff there is off. I have my Christmas present already and the vacation requests are in the system.

'Cause next year, if I'm still in the Hotel, I'll be working the entire holiday season. Gonna enjoy what I have now!

Stay tuned...more later.

Packing

So much to talk about, so little time...so a bit of my day in a nutshell.

I literally was packing a patient's belongings today, and it made my heart ache thinking about it. I packed up stuff for a patient who is on the express train to the hereafter. You know it's heartbreaking when the boss says, "Can you look for his cell phone? They need some numbers only he (Dad) had to make calls for the funeral." Happily, I found it amid all the stuff, but packing and sorting all the toiletries, t-shirts, therapy items and treats was hard. I liked him. He was one of my best patients ever.

We moved people around again. If only the transportation fairy comes to our unit and takes us to the sister unit for a remodel. Maybe Santa Claus will visit next year...

Finally, before I left I was packing supplies to distribute to my rooms down the hall on the way out. A couple of my more macabre coworkers thought I was smuggling out a urinal for a novel "beverage container".

No recycled beverages for me, thanks.

Off to bed...one more day to study...stay tuned.

Slide on over, folks!

You'd think Tuesdays wouldn't be so bad...nurse brings in lots of pens from the conference, people are happy and we are slated for no admissions. I could dream about it, but it wasn't easy at all today. I told our specialist that I am one of the most highly paid janitors/support staff as I filled every single cart on the main hall with isolation gowns. Why? We have support staff, who don't really feel it's their job to do it. No, sitting in front of the boob tube (reserved for patients) and playing pool (also reserved for patients) is really a more productive effort. If my male boss only had some balls. Removing the pool table ones to his office might help the situation.

I had three patients today, and our clinic nurse actually got one ready, since she needed him for a procedure early. I was very grateful. The other two were their usual eccentric selves, and yes, for them it's all about bowels. One goes too much, one goes too little. One gets out of bed without issue and the other leaves a trail on the sliding board as he's transferring. What does the nurse win, Pat? Another heave ho back to the bed for the patient, with the nurse leading the charge.

Just remember all you nursing students out there, if a patient is stuck in transfer halfway on the bed, you can get them all the way there by employing a maneuver I like to call "the dump". Basically, you get their legs and heave them onto the bed. They may be on their side and a little off kilter, but once you get them to the safety of the bed, put up whatever rails you can on any side they could slide out on, and maneuver them around from the other. I love low air loss mattresses, especially if they're made up right, because, by nature, the sheets are slick and you can slide most people wherever you need them to go in bed with little effort.

Said sliding mess patient eventually did get cleaned up, got lunch and got to the wheelchair for afternoon therapy. It was a workout though, for him and for me. I read this article tonight very carefully, so I can keep my back out of trouble!

After all that excitement, I got to move another patient because his roommate was isolated for a new bug. Yes, I'm an expensive mover, too.

More later...stay tuned.

Happy New Year!

Oh, it's still cold, and I'm still hacking from this cold/random virus, but it's great to get to sleep in before I go back to the evening shift tonight.

We had lots of fun here at the homestead last night. I actually made that red lentil soup in the crockpot, and even though I put a tad too much chicken stock in it, it worked. I packed up the remainers and Dahey will have a hot, steamy bowl of soup next week (a few times, actually) in his lunch. Since I've been on a soup run of sorts lately, he's had soup in his lunch just about every day. Right now, this is the fourth variety in our freezer.

Bubba went straight to bed at his usual time and Dahey and I retreated to the TV room with the remaining sparkly wine and watched this movie, since it's still technically the holiday season. We laughed and laughed. I got on the couch to watch the 10PM news, saw maybe two minutes and fell asleep. I woke up at 0035 to a talk show with Tiger Woods on it, and so I turned off the TV and went to bed.

Speaking of Dahey, no movin', movin' yet. Such is his work and contracting. Thankfully, he's still working, so we'll just be happy with that. Too many people are unemployed right now and work + paycheck = paid bills and no foreclosures, so I must say, that is the best gift of all.

I had some free time yesterday, so I ran through last year's resolutions. So far, this year's look about the same.

Work:

1. I will work hard to be a team player. (I notice that since there's a nursing shortage, people can act like NFL free agents sometimes, which can be hard to deal with. I don't want to be one of those people!)

2. I will learn something new every day. (It helps that I'm reviewing for certification!)

3. I will make sure I do one thing better than the day before.

4. I will grumble less and smile more. (Gotta keep those wrinkles away somehow!)

Home:

1. I will organize my paperwork. (This will be on my list forever!)

2. I will be nicer to my husband and son. (Sometimes Mommy can be a tad...bi%$chy...oops, glad "speller" doesn't read this blog! )

3. I will watch what I eat and drink more water. (Water = good, eating...well, not so good lately! Too much candy and cookies for the nursing staff!)

4. I will read more. (This is one from last year. I just need to put more in the RehabRN book club.)

Hope your start of the year is happy wherever you are. More to come!

I like to move it, move it...

And we'll be doing a bunch more of that at our house soon, both literally and figuratively.

There's always plusses and minuses to moving, but I'll be glad to do it, since Dahey's heading to a new assignment. I love the current Hotel Madison, but they all understand. My shopping buddy, A., will miss me, but now she says, she'll have another place out of town to hang out. My boss and other folks were sad, too, but understanding.

As a result, I'm going to have to figure out which way RehabRN the blog will go. I'm working on some stuff for that, too. I met a lot of neat people at the conference. It was such fun.

More later...