Saturday Night's Alright

Yesterday was my mother's birthday. I sent a giftcard through Amazon and then we (my mother, my brother, Dave and I) went out for dinner, to a nearby burger place (her choice). It was a nice dinner, but as always, I was tired from having worked the night before.

My shift on Saturday was eventful in some ways and completely boring in others.

Dave texted soon after my shift began to tell me that his father had slipped on some ice in his driveway, fallen and fractured his hip. (Dave's father is in his early 80's and lives alone outside of a very small town in Montana, so falls are particularly dangerous--I think.) I didn't find the text until just after 1:00 a.m. (My phone is silenced while I am at work and the only reason I saw it was because I pulled it out of my pocket to check the date). I texted back, but didn't expect a reply of course. I was running behind on my duties at that point, the combination of eight unfamiliar patients and helping with an admission into another unit.

My evening check-in with the patients can take as little as half an hour though generally they take much longer and sometimes they take what seems like forever. One patient last week wanted forty minutes of my time, which is fine, but behind her were seven other patients that I had to see in the hour remaining before they went to bed. This time, I had to talk to eight patients but one had already gone to sleep when it was her turn (I don't wake them up to check in unless I think they're trying to avoid the process) and there were only one or two who needed more time and attention, and so I was done doing their checks in just under two hours. After checking in, I try to get all my charting done while my discussions with the patients are still relatively fresh in my mind. Charting is an onerous task but it must be done, and since a large chunk of the charting I do is a narrative-style progress report, that takes awhile (at least it does the way I do it. I've seen how others do it, and I'm not impressed.) So charting takes me a couple of hours at least. My goal is to finish within three hours of checking in with my last patient, but I don't hold myself hard and fast to that.

Sometimes a patient says something that I really feel the need to chart further on. Yesterday, it was a teenager's reply when I asked about his relationship with his mother, "I wish someone would take care of me." I felt compelled to write more about his familial dynamic and the lack of support system he faces when he is discharged from the hospital. It's a common enough problem, a kid not having much of a support system outside the hospital, but there was something so plaintive in his appeal. I'd like to write more about this kid. I'd like to write out his whole story and the awfulness he's faced in his life and how, despite that, he presents as an intelligent, well- and carefully spoken young man, but of course there is nothing more I can say.

I was about two-thirds done with charting when I was called down to help with an admission. That was just before eleven, just before the techs change shifts, and didn't get back to my unit until about midnight.

Two of us do a careful safety check when a new kid arrives and so I was helping with that (if the kid is a girl, we try to have two women do the safety check, and if the kid is a boy, we try to have at least one male helping). After that, I walked the kid down to the new unit, did a bit more of the admission process, gave her something to eat, and sat and chatted with her while she ate, then helped her to bed. Then I went back to my own unit and checked with the techs who had arrived on shift almost an hour before. They were fine, of course. One of them asked if she could take her break in the office where I work so she could try to sleep (I had offered the week before) and of course I said yes. Poor thing. She kept saying, "Are you sure it's okay? Are you sure?" I try to baby the techs and give them as much agency as I can since I rely on them so much. I set her up in the office, showed her how to turn up the heat and how to turn on the portable heater (I don't use either, preferring to keep the office as cold as possible to help me stay awake), and then went out and did some work that I was assigned to do around the hospital.

It was cold out, so I wore my coat, but of course the heat was cranked up in the buildings, so I ended up having to take if off and put it back on a bunch of times. I hate that. I feel like I get all sweaty for nothing. (The rest of the night, I just left my coat on the unit and wore a light jacket.)

When I came back from my little jaunt around the hospital, I sat out at the tech's desk to do some charting. I finished that, my other duties, and had a snack and a soda for the caffeine (my coffee cup was in the office, so I went up to the admin building to get a soda from the vending machine).

Then the dead hours stretched out before me. I started watching (re-watching, since I've seen it twice before) Mermaids on youtube while I did some sketching. I had brought some embroidery supplies with me, but didn't end up using them. A couple of patients popped up in the night, one of them potentially troublesome, and the techs and I dealt with that.

Just before six, one of my co-workers came in and gave me my flu shot (which I've been putting off and putting off because I hate getting flu shots, but I had asked her earlier if she could do it for me before the end of shift). It didn't hurt, but my arm was sore and burn-y after. I'm glad it's over and done with. (Later, I went back to the medical building and got an extra vial of the vaccine to bring home to give Dave his flu shot and we did that before I went to bed for the day.)

My relief was early by nearly an hour, so we sat around and gossiped a bit and then she went out and did whatever people who show up an hour early to work do with that time. When she came back at seven, I handed off the patients and went out to meet Dave.

It was a beautiful morning and I slept through most of it. I got about four hours of sleep and got up. I tried to get back to sleep but couldn't. And then it was time to get ready to meet my mother and brother for dinner.