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.