You know you're a nurse when...

1. You get excited about dressing really horrible wounds. I like to consider myself the Queen of the WoundVAC since K. retired.

2. Input and output doesn't faze you.

3. Vomit? How much and what color, you ask.

4. And if the doc recommends this (as a transferring physician did recently), you know exactly what it is.

The colors of rehab

Yes, you'd see a lot of colors on our unit, and it's not just in the scrubs worn by the staff. There are colors in therapy--yellow, pink, blue Theraputty in those tubs. Next, you have the therabands in blue, green and red. The drugs even have pretty colors, too--the clear dark-red of guaifenesin, the fruity-smelling, clear with a gold tinge of liquid Neurontin, the neon yellow-green of Tygacil. Our patients have colorful equipment, too--the red, blue, black, silver, American flag print, green and even purple wheelchairs.

Also, if you didn't know it already, you see a lot of colors in the input and output for patients. The strangest thing I ever saw on a bed pad recently was an aqua-blue serous looking drainage. The patient never had it during the day, because I looked each time I turned him. I told the docs about it on Monday and everyone just said, "Oh well," and that was it.

So yesterday, I saved the pad after I cleaned him up and bluish dressing. The docs didn't figure it out right away, but the NPs took one look and they did. "Pseudomonas!", they chimed in chorus. "We have to get something to put on that dressing." MA ordered Iodaform gel, but we couldn't get it by the end of the day, so she gave me a new order to use Gentamicin cream with the dressing until the gel arrives. I fixed him up, fluffed, buffed and turned him and before I knew it, it was time to go home.

Outside, the sky was a brilliant, sun-filled blue with just a hint of the fall coolness to come and the end of another interesting day. More later!