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Saturday, September 29, 2007

 

crush

Eating Seattle: Crush

I recently went to Crush with my husband and parents, and it was fantastic. I wholeheartedly agree with this positive review.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

 

back to school

I'm back at school this week for my next-to-last quarter of nursing school. This quarter the courses are Childbirth and Community Health. I am looking forward to the labor & delivery stuff because I think it's interesting, even though I have no intention of being an L&D nurse myself. The community health coursework is really boring to me... a lot of it is about policy and health care access and all that wonky sort of stuff that just makes me feel impotently angry. However, I think I'm going to be able to shadow a hospice nurse for my clinical for that class, which will be great.

Right now I'm still feeling very confused. I'm pretty sure I know what dates I'm supposed to be where, but that's about all I know. I'm not even sure what paperwork I'm supposed to turn in tomorrow! I hate feeling lost.

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Thursday, September 20, 2007

 

CNA vs. nurse

I've had an interesting experience at work in the last week - I worked two shifts masquerading as a CNA rather than my usual team-nursing nurse tech role. (Why would I do such a thing? One day I got called in because of a scheduling mix-up, and I was available so I went, and the other time was because I'd agreed to cover a CNA who needed a day off.) At my hospital, CNAs are responsible for about 8 or 9 patients, and take care of the basic caregiving stuff such as: checking vital signs, bathing, changing beds, ordering meals if patients need help, helping patients eat if necessary, toileting, monitoring intake and output, refilling water pitchers, emptying catheter bags and wound drains, toting meal trays to the tray return cart, taking out laundry bags, and answering call lights (which ends with, "I'll tell your nurse" about 50% of the time). Okay, so since I usually do primary care for my own patients, I do all that stuff on a usual day, but not for 8 patients!

Things that I didn't have to worry about as a CNA were: attending report, passing meds, assessing pain, troubleshooting IVs, talking to doctors, or documentation.

One of the RNs who precepted me earlier this summer asked me which I thought was harder - the CNA role or the nurse role. I actually hesitated quite a while to think it over - and I'm still not sure. I felt busier as a CNA, because I had to see to the needs of so many different people. But I felt like I was much more superficially involved with each patient - I didn't even know what many of their diagnoses were, and I did no followup whatsoever on their plans of care. I just covered the basics and passed the buck for anything else to the nurse. I actually found that deeply unsatisfying, because I wanted to know what was going on with the patients. Were they getting better? Worse? Would they be discharged tomorrow? Were they getting medicines that might be causing unpleasant side effects?

I think this means that I am thinking like a nurse. This is a good thing.

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backstabbing

May posted today about (among other things) what she does when a patient has something negative to say about another nurse. This is what May said:

sometimes, they have bad things to say. to that i say something to this effect: “i’m sorry you had some problems with your nurse today, i’m sure she/he had reasons. sometimes, we do get crazily busy around here.” this is not because i am some sort of a saint or a hypocrite or something, but i just think it is unprofessional to fire up negative issues. there are a lot of real issues we need to deal with, and nurse bashing, or the implication of it, in my opinion, should not be one of them.


I appreciate May's tact! I dealt with a similar situation at work recently, where a patient called me in to ask me to get some clean linens, and spent the whole time I was changing the bed ranting about the nurse who had been taking care of him all day. He complained about his pain control, his perception that his nurse had been ignoring him, and about his frustration with being sick and not knowing why he was sick or when he would get better. My first reaction was to feel defensive about his nurse - she is a terrific nurse and had been taking good care of him - but before I opened my mouth I realized that this didn't have anything to do with his nurse. So instead I said something like "I'm not going to defend the nurse because I wasn't here and I don't know what happened between you" and then followed up with "Of course you're frustrated, you don't feel well and you are hurting!" and he visibly calmed down. He continued to vent and I continued to acknowledge his feelings and by the time I finished making the bed, he was much calmer and apologized for unloading on me. I told him it was no problem, that I was glad he felt better after getting it off his chest.

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Friday, September 14, 2007

 

arrrrrrr!



My pirate name is:


Mad Jenny Bonney



Every pirate is a little bit crazy. You, though, are more than just a little bit. You can be a little bit unpredictable, but a pirate's life is far from full of certainties, so that fits in pretty well. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network

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Tuesday, September 11, 2007

 

book report: The Body Farm

The Body Farm
by Patricia Cornwell

Eh, it was ok. I picked this out of the many Kay Scarpetta novels because of the title - the Body Farm is a research facility where forensic scientists study the decomposition of bodies in a variety of settings, which I learned about when I read "Stiff" - but this book was only so-so. And there wasn't very much about the Body Farm itself.

For all the snide comments I've made about the Temperance Brennan novels, I am going back to them with open arms. At least Tempe does real science and tells us about it!

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Wednesday, September 05, 2007

 

house

Finally, after all of my moaning and complaining, it looks like someone is going to buy our dang house after all! We reached mututal acceptance on a price today, just $5,000 under our asking price. The deal is still contingent on inspection, but we don't anticipate any problems cropping up with that... hopefully we will be able to close in two weeks! Then the eating of bon-bons can begin. No, wait, I mean then I can afford to pay my tuition for fall quarter.

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