Remembering

Back during the first couple years of my career, one of the most common summer injuries was of pedestrians struck by vehicles. Living by a resort town always saw some high school or college kid on vacation who thought they could run across the street before that next vehicle got to the intersection. For the record, the car wins every time. Always.

After time of death was announced on one of these kids, most everyone cleared out of the room. I had looked at the massive skull fractures on the CT scout image, and wanted to see for myself what that correlated to in a real person. So I walked up to the head of the bed and carefully stuck my finger into the gaping wound on this kids' scalp. The doctor walked over while I was doing this and pointed out smaller details that I hadn't yet noticed - how neatly the scalp separates from the skull, how jagged some edges can be while others are the cleanest of breaks. She walked out of the room, and I was left there with my finger still poking into the skull of a dead 17 year old.

I remember being so thrilled with the action of the trauma team, the organized chaos, the medical knowledge versus the brute force to deal with orthopedic trauma. I was still riding the high of this experience, and then all of a sudden I realized exactly what I was doing. I had my hand inside the scalp of a dead 17 year old. A kid on vacation with his friends. Someone only a few years younger than I was. I hadn't even closed his eyes after time of death was called.

That morning after I got off work, I cried the whole way home. How could I have been excited to do something like that? I never wanted to become so immune to the tragedy of the ER that I forgot I was dealing with real lives, real people.

Here I am six years after becoming a nurse. I look back at that day and wonder if I would have cried afterwards if the same scenario replayed tomorrow. Would I still be shocked at the moment I remembered there was a real person on that stretcher? Would I have forgotten it in the first place? Or would I just be excited for a complicated trauma, and never really stopped to think about it at all?

I've changed so much as a nurse. Much of it is for the positive - I'm smarter overall, more confident in my nursing, better able to handle high stress situations. I am way more skilled in the things JCHAO cares about and more solid at the clinical skills. Does this make me a better nurse? I don't know. I do know that I haven't cried on the way home in a long time, and I think that speaks volumes.

Tea and sympathy

Every now and then I get curious as to how people stumble upon this blog. Such was the case today when looking through the referral google searches and stuff.

Someone yesterday found it by typing "who else hates meditech."

Anonymous person, I feel your pain. I really do. And to answer your question, me. I hate meditech.

Press onward, stay strong, and pray that one day the hospitals advance to 2015 and dump meditech like it's yesterday's taco & elotes washed down with a pint of beer.

Gowns 2.0

We already know that people somehow forget how to use their brain and what sentences mean when they come into the ER. The most annoying example of this is when I ask someone to take off all of their clothing then put on a gown, and I come back three minutes later to find not only have they not taken off any their clothing but that somehow layers have been added prior to donning the gown. Seriously. People. Clothing off, gown on, in that order. It's not rocket science.

The flip side to this, however, happened to me the other night. I pulled the IV cart into the room to get things set up, and the patient hadn't changed into the gown yet. So while I'm getting IV stuff ready, I asked her to get undressed and turned around to give a smidgeon of privacy. It was really fucking cold here in Texas recently so the lady was buttoned up like a champ with extra layers on, mind you. I'm not turned around for more than fifteen seconds when she announces that she's all changed. I look back, and my god this woman has somehow managed find a space-time wormhole in which to get undressed, gowned, de-shoed, and covered back up in a blanket. She even folded her shirt and pants. Clearly she has no respect for the laws of physics because that process should have taken waaaay longer.

Again. I have no idea how on God's green earth she managed to get herself situated so quickly. Fifteen seconds. If I'm lying I'm dying. All I could think of was this: