Thursday, March 18, 2021

March 18

 Y'all, I did a charge dayshift on Tuesday. DAYSHIFT. I'm honestly trying to remember the last time I worked a real, honest to god dayshift from 7a-7p. I can't think of it in the past 5 years, so question mark if it ever even happened? Maybe a partial dayshift when I used to pick up at home hospital, but that was 7 years ago so...

Anyway, DAYSHIFT. One of the new dayshift charge nurses got hired into the position, trained for it, completed orientation, signed up for her shifts on the next schedule, said schedule got finalized and released, and then she resigned two days later having accepted a job elsewhere. This nurse is a dumpster person in general, so while I'm not sad to see her go I am annoyed that she screwed all the other charges over. Like, why even bother signing up if you literally know you're leaving? Ugh.

But anyway, that's why they needed coverage help. So me, being the poor sucker that I am, agreed to a dayshift. BOY HOWDY is it different from nightshift. For starters I had to be there during the daytime. Shocking, I know. But I am a permanently midshift type of person. My brain becomes functional around 9-10 am, and firing on all cylinders around 11a. Which makes me perfect for mids, and capable of nightshift. But when my alarm went off at 0515...not my best moment, and many regerts. 

I also have the reputation of being a true shit magnet, and all the nightshift people thought it was hilarious when I showed up for report at 0645. They laughed their way out the door with warnings to dayshift about me. It was a beautiful two hours of nothing happening, and then promptly at 0900 it was like someone threw a grenade made of critical patients into the department. I shit you not, there was a STEMI and two Code Strokes AT THE SAME TIME. I activated two of them at once with the emergency page system, and they had me on hold for a second because they were already activating the first one from triage. Then we had a trauma come in, and then there was rumors of a CPR arriving, and at that moment the triage nurse called me and kindly asked me to fuck off back to nightshift.

But the crowning moment of terrible day was when I sent a very, very sick looking lady to one of our trauma rooms because I thought she might die any second and it turns out that BONUS FUN she was also covered in bedbugs. Like, crawling over her. I thought the primary nurse was going to kill me.

Then 7 pm rolled around and honestly it wasn't so bad because the day flew by but I don't know if I'm cut out for that early life. Consistently being awake at 0515 sounds just terrible. But it was very nice to get out of work and have a couple of hours at home to wind down. Who knows, maybe I'll do it again sometime?

***

Look at my garden! I got most everything put in, and we're building a third bed which will get the cucumbers, more tomatoes, and more squash/zucchini. Plus I impulse purchased a couple of strawberry plants yesterday, so we'll see how those go. 



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't incriminate yourself but blink twice if you locked any administrators in a supply closet.

knittynurse said...

OMG! I literally laughed out loud about the triage nurse telling you fuck off back to night shift!! I can imagine them thinking “Oh, how bad of a shit magnet can she be?” and then regretting that thought for the rest of their lives! Once a shit magnet, always a shit magnet.

Oldfoolrn said...

Your garden is off to a good start. I'm so glad you survived that day shift.