My Letterman Countdown

I meant to write this sooner and publish it on May 31st, but this will have to do. On May 31st, my nursing license officially expired!!!! I am soooo happy!! It's not that I hate nursing, it's more that I loathe nursing. Hee. Hee. My parents were concerned that I decided to let my license expire but if it became necessary for me to go back to work I could retrain and go back fairly quickly; I know lots of nurses who stopped working while they were raising their kids and then went back. Also, if I really had to go back to work permanently, I'd go back to college and do something I want to do, like be a librarian or archaeologist or a professional genealogist or floral designer for weddings or well, you get the picture that there's a lot I'd rather do. Anyway, on to my countdown of 13 reasons why I'm so happy to be out of nursing. (Yes, it's more than Letterman's Top 10, but 13 was an appropriate number I felt.)

13. Being called racist because I asked a nurses assistant (who happened to be African American) to change an elderly man who was lying in a pool of diarrhea and being told a nurse can do that too, this is while she was eating breakfast on a break that she's only supposed to take if things on the unit weren't busy (I only took a breakfast break 3 times in the entire 9 months I worked there), meanwhile I had two calls out to doctors, 5 charts with new orders, and had only done 2 of my assessments on the 8 patients I had that day (usually I would have had them all done by that time of the day), and I was sweating I was going so fast and things were so busy and of course, none of my charting was done. (This is another reason why I refuse to ever live in the South again--our unit in Phoenix was like the UN, I never had problems with anyone ever. Even in NM where half the staff was Navajo and there were always rumors of racial tensions, I always got along with everyone. It's so pathetic of an excuse for her to use.)

12. Two weeks after starting work as an LPN, standing in a pool of blood, literally at least 3-4 ft in diameter, holding a towel to an elderly woman's head and looking at the other LPN who was pretty much like me and had no idea what to do. We called 911 and let them take her to the hospital where her head wound was stapled. All I could think to do at the time to feel the least bit useful besides applying pressure was to keep asking level of consciousness questions that we had gone over in one of my nursing classes the week before.

11. Having to clean up a bathroom that was literally sprayed with the contents of a colostomy bag. The poor, poor CNA was showering off and the janitors refused to go in till it was cleaned up somewhat. Add to that the smell of any colostomy, the smell of gangrene, and the smell of C. diff.

10. Tunneling bedsores.

9. Families of patients that bicker constantly, interrupt your work constantly to ask the same questions that another sibling has just asked, and can't understand why their 98 yr. old father best option is not intensive physical therapy rehab. (Just as a side note, if your ever in that situation, write down all your questions, set a time with the nurse where you can talk and then let her do her work the rest of the time. It's not so bad when it's just one patient's family, but I've had where it was two or three families and it just makes it impossible to accomplish anything for those patients or any other patients.)

8. Wiping the bottom of a 30-something morbidly obese diabetic patient because they can't reach and listening to them complain about you not giving them the 4 icecreams they requested and trying to think of polite way to tell them that they had already eaten all the icecreams on the entire unit along with all the jello, chocolate milk, and graham crackers, and hadn't the whole pizza they just ordered to the floor and eaten in one sitting filled them up?

7. Permanently wrecking my right shoulder (I still can't sleep on that side) by lifting quadriplegics etc. that were double my weight.

6. Being yelled at because I wasn't pushing in the dilaudid fast enough by a patient that was receiving a 7 mg dose every three hours (that would probably kill me, to give you some perspective). Having that patient come back month after month for undiagnosable pain (we concluded it was whenever the price of street drugs went up.)

5. Having my chest groped at while putting on a condom cath for the fifth time that night which had "somehow" come off. I have to admit that although technically it would not be considered good practice, I finally had the man put in restraints because the CNA and I were so sick of it. You can add to this one being offered money for well, something I won't go into details about.

4. Seeing a baby born at 24 weeks with the teenage mother so high that she had no clue what was going on and the baby's father who was at least 60 and hadn't taken a bath in what smelled and looked like months yelling at us to give the baby whiskey to fix it. We finally asked him to leave the nursery.

3. Applying pressure to the groin area of a man for 10 minutes after the removal of a line (all of his other veins were too scarred from drug use to be any good) while his wife and girlfriend argued in the room and he still had the gall to make passes at me. He had by the way tried to commit suicide by drinking several packs of beer and antifreeze. Any psych patient.

2. Having a patient's leg amputated after infection in the bone set in on an ankle fracture that had required pinning. This was right after I started working at this nursing home and I was doing dressing changes on the wound on her ankle and although the skin was healing nicely, it just didn't feel right. Anyway, I asked the charge nurse (who had 20+ yrs experience--this was the start of my second year as an RN) and she didn't seem that concerned at all. I did call the patient's orthopedic surgeon twice, but they said she had an appointment in a couple weeks and they'd see her then. By then, it was much to late. A year later, I had barely stopped doing dressing changes on the stump and she was starting to walk a few steps with a prosthetic limp. This is one reason why nursing made me much more forceful to get attention when I think it's needed.

1. Going to take an elderly man his meds in the late afternoon--his family had taken him out to lunch that day--and not finding him in the room, assuming he must still be out. Later I had some CNAs look to see if he was back and he still wasn't, so we checked the log book to see if his family had signed in and out, which they hadn't. I checked the room again at dinnertime, and still no sign of anything disturbed or out of place (usually whenever he was in his room he had a baseball game on). Finally after dinner, I was just getting more and more worried and just had this niggling panic in the back of my mind that we were missing something, so I went back down to his room again, opened the bathroom door and found him there in a pool of urine and deliriously rambling. It literally made me physically ill. I had him taken to the hospital to be checked out. I had no idea how long he'd been there and it was just so sad, I can't believe I didn't look there earlier.

Basically, I just really hated feeling incompetent when I didn't know something (like meds, I'm horrible about meds) and feeling so rushed that a) I can't do as good a job as I would have liked, and b) I can't show as much compassion as I would have liked (for instance this lady whose husband had a stroke and she was telling me she had filled the car with gas for the first time in her life that day, I just really felt strongly that she needed support, but I didn't have time).

Just so you don't think I'm horrid, I do have to admit that I enjoyed giving shots. Okay you still may think I'm horrid, but I just mean I did enjoy some things in the nursing field. I enjoyed changing the dressing on this one lady with necrotizing faciitis (I'd post pictures of what that looks like, but I think I'd lose readers), anyway it's this disease that eats away the skin tissue, it was across her entire abdomen and thighs. The patient was able to go to a nursing home eventually after spending months on our unit and the ICU, but she died there. I also enjoyed working on the orthopedic unit where patients three days after having a knee or hip replacement were already so happy about how much better they could move. And I did cry a bit when I said goodbye to my two favorite residents, Mrs. G. and Father H. (this Catholic priest who I imagine is a lot like what President Hinkley was like) at a nursing home I quit working at. Oh, and the sideline of working as a bartender at the same place. At one point I was giving out shots of whiskey, rum, scotch, and vodka every night to different patients.

Well, onward with full-time motherhood!!