Sunday, March 08, 2009

A simple request....

I have both Lyle Lovett and Boulevard's Double-Wide IPA floating around in my head tonight.

Boulevard Double-Wide IPA: (stealth product review!) It's okay. It's good, even. Not a genie in a bottle, and I would've preferred less Belgian-style head and darkness and more clean, aggressive hoppiness, but that's just me. The label admonished me to drink it out of one of those roundish glasses that stands on a little pedestal, but I haven't got those, so jelly jar it was. 

Lyle Lovett: Always good.

A simple request for all of my patients:

Please understand. Please don't be angry or snippy with me. Please don't make me hand your head to you after you're a jerk.

It's just that, you know, when there's one patient coding and another whose leg has suddenly turned a dusky blue and gotten cold, and a third who's bleeding uncontrollably out of her rectum and a fourth who is seizing, *your* particular request--that the IV fluids Mama's getting be turned down because "she's peeing too much"--might come fourth or fifth on my To-Do list.

I will turn down Mama's fluids from 70 to 30, but only after I make sure everybody else on the floor is breathing. As the oldest/most experienced/best at starting IVs nurse here, it's kind of my responsibility. Kind of like interrogating that drain to make sure there isn't a split in the tubing that leads from the brain to the bag is my responsibility.

Please, please, *please* do not overburden the already-overburdened charge nurse with your request. It only makes you look like a twit. And please, for the love of all that's country & western, do not be snarky when I show up to ("Finally! [eyeroll]") turn down the fluids, because that might make me morph from Nurse Jo to Take No Bullshit Abortion-Clinic Jo. And that's ugly.

Thank you.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

He could ride me on his boat any day. Just sayin'.

Anonymous said...

If you ever get your hands on the appropriate glassware for the beer you might want to give that one another try. My husband the beer connoisseur (read: snob) has tried the same beer both without and with the glassware and it can take an okay beer to an amazing one. It might not make a difference for that particular beer but thought it was worth a mention.

woolywoman said...

Dayum. You need a union. Or to move to California. On a pony on a boat.Patient ratios are the best thing that ever happened to my nursing practice,not that it eliminates stupid family members.

Jo said...

Wooly: Our ratios are great--all those patients weren't mine. If they had been, I would've been a candidate for a head transplant.

Normally I take four to five patients a day, three if one or more is on the edge. Unfortunately, as you pointed out, ratios at Sunnydale are determined by acuity, not by the IQ of family members.

Norm and Nancy said...

You naled t! mean haven't we ALL had those kind of 'well-meaninig' famly members?!?! Thanks for the giggle. I love your writing style.