I was working the other day with 1 full time RN, and 2 casuals. The casuals were ++experienced but were not familiar so much with my ED.
The other FT RN was busy with some sickies so I ended up being the go-to person to ask questions about different things in the area we were working in. OK I know this sounds stupid but this is the first time in my nursing career that I was the one that was knowledgeable.
It felt kinda cool. If only I had time to enjoy it... wow was it ever busy!
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
I'm still here.
I'm still here, keeping busy getting married and trying to enjoy life OUTSIDE the ED.
Staffing issues continue, but tempers have settled down. We're still trying to manage things and people are WAY TOO SICK lately but that's how it goes when you work inside an emerg.
I'm triage trained but yet to spend more than my orientation hours there. I triage at the bedside when there's no offload nurse but otherwise I'm mostly in a 3 or 4 bed assignment. It seems pretty good compared to other EDs but since we have hardly any support staff (we have someone who stocks things and another person to clean up things) we do all our patient care by ourselves. (Oh we don't do our own ECGs... that's about it)
Before I went on holidays there was a patient who had developed a GI bleed that had continued to bleed despite conservative treatment. She was young, and started to crash right before shift change (surgery wanted to wait it out to see if it would stop on its own and ended up doing a emergency surgery instead). It was the first time in a long time that I took a patient "home with me" . Usually I can handle seeing people die or almost die or see people really sick and it doesn't bother me. This time, for a few days all I saw was blood pour out of orfices and us scrambling to help her. I guess it particularly bugged me because I had been watching her like a hawk all night and then she started circling the drain rather quickly. I did what I had to do in terms of noticing she was getting worse at an early start of her circling, but then she crashed faster than I expected.
Luckily she made it to the O.R. and through surgery.
Staffing issues continue, but tempers have settled down. We're still trying to manage things and people are WAY TOO SICK lately but that's how it goes when you work inside an emerg.
I'm triage trained but yet to spend more than my orientation hours there. I triage at the bedside when there's no offload nurse but otherwise I'm mostly in a 3 or 4 bed assignment. It seems pretty good compared to other EDs but since we have hardly any support staff (we have someone who stocks things and another person to clean up things) we do all our patient care by ourselves. (Oh we don't do our own ECGs... that's about it)
Before I went on holidays there was a patient who had developed a GI bleed that had continued to bleed despite conservative treatment. She was young, and started to crash right before shift change (surgery wanted to wait it out to see if it would stop on its own and ended up doing a emergency surgery instead). It was the first time in a long time that I took a patient "home with me" . Usually I can handle seeing people die or almost die or see people really sick and it doesn't bother me. This time, for a few days all I saw was blood pour out of orfices and us scrambling to help her. I guess it particularly bugged me because I had been watching her like a hawk all night and then she started circling the drain rather quickly. I did what I had to do in terms of noticing she was getting worse at an early start of her circling, but then she crashed faster than I expected.
Luckily she made it to the O.R. and through surgery.
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