Bigger or Better: Life outside of Texas

  More vignettes from the hospital life. On the deeper side. One of my patients was very anxious to go home. We made sure he had supplies, and that his prescriptions would be filled, and that he had a ride. Then I find out the discharge from the hospital will be delayed to sort out continued care at home. He's not happy, and even though I explain how all the appropriate people are doing what is in their power to get this set up, he tells me to tell them to get a move on. I'm considering calling in a mediator at that point, because I'm frustrated, and he's frustrated, and I was running out of constructive things to say. Basically. Read between the lines there. So I talk to the discharge nurse, and to his primary team, and we decide to let him go and we'll call him with the information he needs. I pass the news on, and he's happier. Crisis averted. His sister comes to pick him up, and I'm actually able to give him the needed discharge information. Hurray, c...

Today at work was stressful. The more frazzled I get, the more likely I am to lose my temper (there is a strong, well-established correlation for that...). Thankfully, laughter saved me. So here are some of my most appropriate, non-morbid, funny nursing experiences. One of my patients was about to be discharged, but he still had a PICC (basically, a bigger IV that places the medications and fluids in the bigger blood vessels near the heart) that needed to be removed. A specially-trained nurse has to take it out, and I needed an order from the doctor for PICC removal by this IV team nurse. So I paged the doctor, told her what I needed, and waited for the order to show up in the computer. When it did, I laughed, showed my co-workers, and laughed again. The order said "make the PICC line go away by removing it from the patient." Some of us speculated that she had wanted us to abra-kadabra it away--POOF. As my unit is primarily a post-surgical unit, most of my patients h...

FYI this is probably about as valentine-y as I will get in a blog post. Note the allusion to Romeo and Juliet, and let's move on. So, names. Sometimes I feel that naming a person must be the heaviest burden placed on any other human being. We're born, it's really hard to tell what our personality is or really what we're going to look like as an adult, but our parents have to come up with something so the hospital can place a name band identifier on our infant legs. Talk about responsibility. My parents didn't have a name picked out for me at birth. When I ask them why they picked the name Sara, they say it's because I didn't look like a Jessica. I'm thinking I didn't look like a whole lot of anything distinguishable at 5 hours old, but whatever, they named me Sara. Turns out a lot of other people some 20 odd years ago also thought their babies looked like Saras, because a lot of my classmates had the same moniker. When I hit college, and had 3 ot...