Dealing with the devil

Today, I was dealing with some of his minions.

Dahey, through no fault of his own, got a new-to-him employer. Nothing new, just one of the bonuses of working in his line of work.

Said employer, which I shall now call Highly & Grossly iLogical Inc. gave him a mandate to fill out all of the on-boarding paperwork this weekend. This meant I got to use my home printer and my own ream of paper for all the forms. No more print shop for these folks! No submitting online, either, because  they require paper with signatures.

The e-mails were terse and there was a 27 point checklist, including boring stuff as insurance, training plan, and even their social media policy.

I knew they were high up on the illogical part, when Dahey called me, not once, not twice but three times in the last two days about insurance. As a regular employee at the Hotel (with good rates) I get it.  Dahey filed the waiver and Highly Illogical Inc. sends several more terse e-mails saying, "What we had on the waiver is not good enough".

The waiver said to include your insurance information (written) and a screen shot of  your information on the company website (with dependents, etc.) as your proof of enrollment.

The first screenshot was rejected because it didn't have a date on it.

The second screenshot was rejected because I couldn't screen capture the date on my desktop, so I took a picture with my phone and e-mailed that.

The third screenshot didn't have my name (but did have the date, insurance company and how many people I insured ).

Dahey was frazzled. I called the insurance company. The people who can send those "I have insurance" letters were gone for the day. They said they can send me one tomorrow when they return if I have a secure fax. It's in a room that locks (and we get patient info on it, so maybe it qualifies).

 Finally, I hiked over six blocks to the other side of campus to see our HR department. They had never heard of such craziness (and I talked to six of them). One of the staffers (who handles insurance) gave me one of my official personnel record forms with my insurance election on it.

Since it does have sensitive data, I elected to go home and write an e-mail to the supervising (er, harassing) HR specialist at Illogical Inc. I put a read receipt on it so it would sound official (and hopefully, irritating).

Dear Mrs. Dick (not kidding- just slightly altered to protect the guilty):

Here are three screenshots that you rejected earlier today. I hope these are less blurry. I have another form that the Hotel has given me from my official record today, but as it has sensitive information, I cannot send it to you until I can get to a secure fax.

I will forward it and any other information to you tomorrow. My phone numbers are below. Please contact me directly, as I am the subscriber, not Dahey.

Please note: I may not answer your call immediately if I am caring for patients. Please leave a message and I will return your call as soon as I can.

RehabRN

Now I just hope that they stop harassing Dahey. I'm not getting very good vibes right now about Illogical.  They won't like me if they continue to p*&s me off.

More later as the saga continues....

The tales of woe

The word of my day was woe.

"Woe is me." I heard from the specialist who's complaining that the other specialist at X Hospital is bad mouthing him to our patients. Who tells specialist this tale? The patient. Specialist has taken care of patient forever, before he/she ever even went to X Hospital in our system. Patient told Specialist the truth, and he decided to tell me.

Kids, haven't you ever heard that maxim, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."? "No surprise" I told our Specialist. "He (and his hospital) have done weirder things lately." Frankly, I'm surprised upper management isn't reigning them in yet.

It was woe for our staff, too. I couldn't believe it when I saw our home health nurse doing assessment documentation on a newly arrived patient. She's usually out on the road somewhere, but for some reason, she got called into an admission that should have been completed by the floor nurse.  Not sure why the boss let that happen, but I'm so glad it wasn't me!

There was woe for one of our patients' families. Said patient died over the weekend. We really liked him (at least most of us did). Rudy was a very opinionated character who almost made it to his speed limit birthday, but he had a heart attack and never regained consciousness. He and I got along very well. I was the person who set up his Fritos whenever he was on our unit (he was a Frito maniac).

Rudy told me he wasn't afraid to die because, during one of his many spates of illness, he had had a near death experience. "Heaven is beautiful", he told me. "I saw it and I really wanted to stay, but they told me I had to go back. I saw the Devil, too."

"Really?" I asked. "How did you know it was the Devil?"

"He looked just like the pictures...and he had a bottle of Jack Daniels, trying to get me to go with him."

"No way!" I said. He just shook his head yes.

So from then on, it was our inside joke about Jack Daniels. I told him one night when he spiked a temp late in the shift, "Rudy, I know Heaven was nice, but could you just wait to go there until my shift is over? And whatever you do, don't take the Jack Daniels." Rudy eventually recovered and we laughed about it.

Happily, all of Rudy's last year wasn't a tale of woe. Rudy got to see his grandchildren born and he was so proud. I saw him from time to time and I always gave him trouble. On his last visit to the unit, I told him he had the most seniority (as in he'd been coming to our unit for so long) on the unit, so he'd better help us train our new staff.

"And Rudy," I told him, "if they say you're mean and quit, I'm gonna call you up."

He just smiled. I opened the last bag of Fritos I ever gave him during that stay while his family looked on bemused. Sure we spoiled him sometimes, but he was like our family. I figured out in the last couple of years, I'd spent more time on the unit with Rudy than I have with my own family.

Rudy was a Marine through and through. He loved the Corps and educated me that the Marines wear scarlet not red.

And like the old Marine saying goes, I send it out today to Rudy, not Chesty this time: "Goodnight Rudy, wherever you are." I'm praying you're in Heaven where it's beautiful and not with the Devil and Jack Daniels.

Godspeed, dear friend. I'll miss you and all your Fritos, too.

Pondering the universe

When it's a slow shift, I often go out looking for stuff. It's just my nature to be busy. Perhaps a little too much of the "idle hands are the tool of the Devil" stuff when I was a kid.

I was surfing away this morning and ran into this post at Reality Rounds. Thankfully, in rehab settings, we don't drop "the bomb" on people too much. That bomb has already exploded by the time we get people, due to accident, illness or other random idiocy, and we're busy picking up pieces and putting things back together for the rest of life.

As a result of too much time, I started looking at labs, and found a high alkaline phosphatase on one of our old timers. We don't diagnose, of course, but when you can historically look at trends, it makes you wonder what's going on with people. I also think it helps me to talk to doctors to see what their take of the situation is with said patient.

Of course, when we have free time, there's always something silly. One nurse buggered up her iPhone and it would not vibrate. We tried to get her to check out www.apple.com to find out what was wrong with it (maybe in the user's guide...hmm?!) but she waited to see what her significant other would say about this problem, since he could fix it since he has the same phone.

Another patient got a generic gadget catalog similar to Harriet Carter. But, he was in for a surprise when he opened one page...they weren't selling any Billy Mays stuff or SlamChops, no they were selling vibrators. He's wondering if the person who gave him the catalog is trying to drop a hint. We shall see, as this becomes yet another inside joke on the unit.

Yes, we have inside jokes everywhere at our place. It's simply a way of coping with time, space and personnel for a lot of our people, who spend an enormous amount of time with us. One guy has his "wife" on our unit. (that's what he calls one of our nurses, who constantly nags him to check his blood sugar).

Finally, a couple of our people said goodbye this week. They went home. One is travelling to a home he's never seen with his long-time fiancee. Another patient is going home, then travelling across the country to live near relatives and meet his online girlfriend. His wife has been gone for a long time and he's finally decided he doesn't want to be alone anymore, after surviving one health issue after another. He is a very smart man, often moody, but frequently nice when he wants to be. With all he's gone through, he deserves whatever happiness he can get.

More later...stay tuned.