Pit Crew

It's Saturday and I'm in lazy mode. Slept in, made a late breakfast (around lunch time) and my goal is to remain in jammies all day. In other words, it's like any other Saturday!

I'm approaching the mid-point of Term 3 and it is everything I feared it would be: extremely rigorous and challenging. The weeks start out with a bang, Monday's being the absolute worst -- a full day of classes ending around 2:00. A quick change into assessment clothing, and bolting down some food before the mad dash to the hospital for pre-planning. Several hours later we return home to eat and dig in for the LONG night of paperwork.

I have yet to get more than two hours of sleep on any given Monday and this continues to frustrate me; not only because I'd like to get more rest, but primarily because I worry that it endangers my patients to have a "zombie-nurse" caring for them the next day. I keep thinking about pilots (since I was married to one) and how the FAA requires them to only work so many hours before they give them a mandatory-grounding to go get some sleep. After all, hundreds of lives are at stake and sleepy pilots are a bad thing. Same goes for nursing in my mind. So, I have begun picking the brains of the seniors around here on the subject of clinical paper work, hoping to pick up some time-saving pointers in order to get a little more rest for my clinicals on Tuesdays. Every Monday is a new chance to learn better time management, prioritization and efficiency -- and I'm determined to streamline. Somehow.

Especially since clinical days are my favorite! I love being in the hospital and I keep winning the "patient lottery" -- each one this term has been a gem. I have just finished my stint in a Telemetry unit -- mostly heart patients and now will spend several weeks back on the Orthopedics floor (which is where I was for my first term). Considering I have a titanium elbow and have had FIVE (yep, five) ortho surgeries myself; I have a great affinity for the ortho patients and can't wait to get back there to see them. Don't get me wrong, my time with the heart patients was fantastic. We actually had a pretty great happy ending there this term. Week 1 we got to listen to a man's chest who had no heart beat -- he was on a VAD (Ventricular Assistive Device), so a machine was circulating the blood continuously through his body. It was eerie feeling for his pulses and finding none, listening to his chest and only hearing a whirring sound. In any case, this young man (in his 30's) had been in the hospital for a month, waiting for a transplant and was getting pretty down, having had a couple of close calls. Well, my last day on the floor, I heard he had finally gotten a match and was at that moment in surgery and hopefully on his way to a new lease on life!

I'll spend several weeks in Ortho before finally getting my OR rotation during the last two weeks of term. I am anxiously awaiting my time in the OR, and wondering if I'll be up for the experience - the gore, the smells, and the hours and hours of standing. It will definitely be a break from the very active clinical days I have had so far.

I was discussing nursing in general with my mom and told her that I feel like I'm being trained to be on the Pit Crew for the human body. We all cruise our way down the road of life, but every once in a while, something goes wrong with our body - the human machine, with all it's electrical wiring, it's circulatory and digestive plumbing, the ambulating pieces and parts. That's where I come in. You'll pull off the road and into my hospital where we will swarm all over you; like the pit crew does for a race car.

And hopefully you'll get back out there on the highway of life, no more worse for wear.

Your welcome.

:)