Abilenerob

At least when you’re new-nursing, anyway.  I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 hours clocked in this week. It would have been 74, but Daylight Savings time scootched me over the edge.  I clocked out this morning and drove immediately to an $11 breakfast that I ate while staring blankly into a room filled with Sunday morning dress clothes wrapped around happily chattering people.

My vascular space is now 74% filled with white gravy and black pepper.

I’m totally okay with that.

Random notes:

When I’ve spent 12 hours priming you with heart rhythm pills and carefully weaning you down off your cardizem, don’t flip immediately back into A-fib ten minutes after I stop the pump. Just… don’t do that.

The PCA bag is 100 mL of some kind of saline stuff with (this is important) 2 mL of actual dope added to it. If you don’t start your calculations with 102 mL total, you’ll spend way too much time you can’t afford snapping freshly-sharpened pencils in two and reworking the same dosage calculations over and over like a moron flunking a first-semester dosage calc test.  There are some times when you’re going to lose that to priming your line, but this isn’t one of those times; I want to know where that 2 mL went, damnit. The universe demands order (in everything but the verb tense of multi-clause run-on sentences.)

Working five nights in a row will make you stupid. If you know that you’re going to be stupid, you will anticipate your own stupidity and compensate accordingly.  You will double check everything, and then you will triple check it, and then you will ask your Charge just to be sure. What you won’t anticipate is the fact that your emotions start to get raw. If you are a low-life (like I am), you will curse viciously and audibly when the beeper goes off for your next admit. You will despise the call-bell. Your shoulders will tense and your nails will dig into your palms when the pulse-ox beeps. When you’re getting report and the day shift tells you that family in room 3 gushed about how much they appreciate the care you gave to their grandma, you will get misty eyed and have to clear your throat and you will hem and haw and look down at your brain sheet while you try to regain some measure of bearing and professional demeanor.

Frequently-Confused-Asshole-Who-Treats-Everyone-Like-Garbage: “Are you a man or a woman?”

Me: “I am a man. Another deep breath, please. Good; let it out.”

Lung sounds: clear in all fields. Good deal.

FCAWTELG: “Your hair looks like a woman’s.  Why do you have a woman’s hairdo?”

Me: “I think it looks good on me. One more deep breath. Good. Let it out. Are you having any trouble going to the bathroom?”

Bowel sounds: present x4. Continuing my assessment, fully cognizant of leaning over the guy who took a swing at one of the kindest female nurses on our floor.

FCAWTELG: “You’ve never been in the service, have you?” Audible sneer in his voice.

Me: “I served four years in the United States Marine infantry. Did a year in Guantamo Bay, then deployed with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, special operations capable. Just breathe normally – I’m listening to your heart.”

Apical pulse: regular. No murmurs or adventitious sounds noted.

FCAWTELG:  Proceeds to tell me “war stories” of his time in the service, brags about his Marine son, and then becomes one of my easiest patients of the week.

Moral of the story: Semper Fi.

The picture on the Me Cam is what was going to be my Halloween costume. I made a paper mache cow skull. I was gonna carve some kind of creepy-looking glyph into its forehead and light it up with a red LED, but I ran out of time and just wore a Guy Fawkes mask and tuxedo jacket. Not sure what to do with it, now. I’m leaning toward painting it with a Day of the Dead motif and using it as a wall decoration.

Until then: blessed sleep.

(You know you’re a night shift nurse when you’ve put away three double Wild Turkey and Cokes by noon on a Sunday.)

I’ve got that groggy, sluggish stupid feel from sleep hangover. I’ve gotta force myself to stick to my sleep remediation schedule when I come off four nights working. Otherwise, I wind up blathering on the internet at 2:30 am, foggy and lethargic, oriented to person and place, but not to time and barely to situation.

My fuel pump has been dead since last winter, rendering my car useless when it’s not blisteringly hot out, forcing me to rely on a $50 bicycle, generous friends with slightly-more-functional transportation, and lots of walking. When summer came and the weather got hot, the car ran fine as long as I parked it nose down on inclines and made a weekly sacrifice of chicken and rum to Papa Shango, the voodoo god of fire and iron.

When the weather got all autumny a couple of weeks ago, the car stopped working again. Fortunately, I don’t have school anymore, so I was able to move easily into a nice routine of just walking to work and walking to the grocery store, both of which are within blocks of my home.

I put my car in the shop last week and just got it back on Wednesday, in the middle of The Work Week From Hell. The less said about the Work Week From Hell, the better. Suffice to say that if I happen to hear the sound of a callbell during the two nights I have off, I’m going to dive under a table and sit there rocking and shaking and screaming and sobbing incoherently until someone calls 911 and the fire department and a nice lady from MHMR have to come drag me out and ship me off to Big Springs.

So, on Thursday morning, I walked home from work, as is my custom. Feet aching, back screaming, knees sore, mind and spirit bruised, needle barely twitching on my giveadamnometer. I got home to discover that there was no longer any dog food, and I had used up the last can of emergency cat rations. I was not at all keen on the idea of walking back to the grocery store, but I was even less keen on the idea of the police breaking down my door in a week and discovering my fat and happy pets grinning stupidly and feasting on the remains of my half-eaten corpse, so I resolved to go to the grocery store.

When I stepped out of my front door, I saw my car sitting at the curb and, well, you know what happened next.

I turned around, grabbed my keys, and drove myself one block to the grocery store.

“One block” is not hyperbole. At the far end of my block is a street. On the other side of that street is the grocery store. To which I drove. And here’s the thing… that’s not the most shameful part of this story.

I bought my stuff. Came home. Fed the animals. Tossed my scrubs on the floor. Crashed hard. Woke up. Showered. Shaved. Put on clean scrubs. Loaded up my pockets with nursey stuff. Walked to work. (I always walk to work, even when my car’s working. It’s only two blocks.)

To get to work, I pass through the parking lot of the grocery store. As I was walking, I thought, “Huh. That Mustang looks just like mine. They’ve even got the same Marines sticker, in the same place on the back window. Weird.”

It took me another five or ten seconds to realize that the reason that car looked like mine is because it was mine, at which point I stopped dead in my tracks thinking, “Who put my car here? What the flying hell?”  It took me probably a full 20 seconds’ worth of standing in the middle of a parking lot like a slack-jawed, dumbfounded moron to put all the pieces together.

I had driven to the grocery store, forgotten that I drove, and just walked home. Upon arriving at home, I failed to notice that my car wasn’t at the curb, and then failed to connect the act with anything meaningful when I took my CAR KEYS out of my pocket and threw them on my desk.

Hi, there. I'll be titrating your cardiac drips this evening.

At least now I know that I should never do anything important between 0800 and 10 am.