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I’ve been awake for almost 24 hours. I was on night duty and I got home around 3:00pm- a full 8 hours after the time I should have gone home which is supposed to be at around 7:00 or 8:00AM. I am so tired. My shift during that night was hell. Toxic, hectic, one big headache. And then on the very last hour of my duty, something happens. Something incredibly, massively stupid, unnecessary and unexpected.
I couldn’t concentrate on the work I had left to do. I was actually crying in the nurses’ station because everything was going horribly horribly wrong. All the little things just kept adding up, from non-answering doctors, non-infusing IV lines, blood transfusion problems, less than 40cc of urine output from a kidney patient (that’s roughly 2 tablespoons), freaking needles, and angry co-workers. If I mentioned them all I’m sure it’ll take up several paragraphs. No wonder a lot of the other nurses I knew wanted to quit. I got dumped with a garbage bag full of things-that-can-possibly-go-wrong-during-your-shift. I tried really hard to keep myself from crying but I couldn’t help it. It was so embarrassing having to cry like that. Thank God I didn’t do it in front of my patients.
It took me until 10AM to finish everything for the unit, then I had to go down to the ER which took up so much time processing because I literally had to go around the hospital wards looking for forms, which my own and about half of all the units didn’t have. Freaking forms! I finished all that, along with filing an incident report. That had me going back and forth from 1st to 2nd to 5th floor. So much paperwork. I didn’t eat breakfast or lunch anymore (who the hell could eat in a condition like that anyway). It took so long that I actually saw the nurses for the afternoon shift. Shit. I never want to have to go through another incident report again, or work on another night shift.
That’s it. That’s pretty much the latest thing in my life.
