Stultification

Sunday:

Every week it's some kind of new frustration at work that has nothing to do with the kids. This week it was a run in with a tech who got above herself and tried to tell me how to do my job. That did not work out for her.

Same night, the unit I was responsible for had three empty beds when I came in and one when I left. It meant two middle of the night admissions to my unit, which sucked. Admissions in the middle of the night means an exhausted kid and exhausted parents. Sometimes they've been sitting the emergency room for hours and hours and hours. The decision was made hours and hours before to admit them, but somehow it gets pushed to two in the morning or four in the morning or five in the morning. (No one has yet adequately explained to me why this happens. We have open beds. We are waiting for the patient. So why are they having to sit another seven or eight hours in the emergency room?) Someone told me that the hospital didn't used to take admissions after midnight, but that one of the supervisors had pushed for it. Great, right? So that means that we have to do even more of the admission process, including the legal paperwork, none of which we are trained to do and all of which is outside my scope of practice. That also pisses me off. I may go to a union rep about that (once I'm off my new-hire probationary period, because I've already made a lot of waves at this job and probably need to slow that down).

That was Thursday night. It was too busy and frustrating and I got pissed off and all that that entails.

Saturday (last night), it was ridiculously quiet. Like, crickets chirping in the background quiet once the kids had gone to bed. The hospital was completely full, so there were no admissions possible, so once the lights were out and my charting was done (by 11:30, which is a record for me) and my other modest duties completed, I had hours and hours to do...whatever. So I worked on the next step of my certification (which includes a fifteen hour online seminar that is mainly a series of one to two hour powerpoint presentations that are murderously boring, especially in the middle of the night) and some particularly pesky paperwork that I've been putting off for awhile.

Tuesday, Today

A morning of frustration. I'm tired today. 

I've been watching the new episodes of The Great British Bake Off as they come out on Netflix (I like Noel Fielding, but the contestants this time around are pretty lackluster) and I've also been The Golden Girls, of course, but I need a new series that doesn't ask a lot of The Brain. Yesterday I watched the second episode of Patrick Melrose on Amazon. It's an amazing series based on the largely autobiographical novels of Edward St. Aubyn, an upper middle class British writer who was molested by his father when he was a child. When I bought the first episode of the series (because it got great reviews and starred Benedict Cumberbatch) a year or so ago, I watched about ten minutes and had to turn it off. It was a wrenching story and my psyche rebelled against it. But perhaps my tolerance has increased after a few months of working with children who have been molested by their fathers, because while it is still a wrenching story, I have been able to make it though two episodes. It's very well done and ugly and awful, too.

I need some fluff, something completely non-taxing to watch. My go-to used to be Daniel Tiger, but Daniel Tiger is a big gun and I try to reserve him for when I feel like my life is going to pieces and I can't get out of bed. I'm not there right now, so I want something in The Golden Girls league, something without any kind of historical significance or any any any kind of horror or witchy aspect to it. Nothing family drama-related. I need something well-written and funny and nice.

Because this is about how I'm feeling about things right now:

Trump showed up to a baseball game expecting cheers and accolades and instead his orange ass got booed. Good. Fuck that racist, misogynistic, narcissistic, abusive asshole. I hope he gets C. diff and shits himself inside out.