Personal Thoughts on life….. [From an RN]
1-Things never turn out the way you expect!
2-Things always take longer than you plan!
3-Things always happen in three’s!
Like this list!
It’s definitely been my experience that no matter what you do in life that your job, your relationships, your food at the local restaurant is never the way you expected it to be.
Going to school is never as much fun, nor as bad as you think it’s going to be then after you graduate and get your first job, work is not as interesting, as exciting and it doesn’t pay as much as you thought it would. You don’t have as much fun on your days off as you expected because by then it seems like college was a blast and wasn’t as hard because flunking a test wasn’t nearly as bad as the possibility of getting fired!
But then you experience your first real illness-maybe you get the flu, maybe you get hospitalized-and you realize that your health is more important than any job you could have, so getting fired doesn’t seem so bad, until you realize that you have no health insurance without your job, that you can’t afford to pay the hospital and clinic bills and can’t pay for the prescriptions to get you healthy!
So you go back to work on a Monday morning and for those of you who are RN’s like me you realize you’re going to have 4 new patients you’ve never seen before and they all have a med list longer than War and Peace, so completing the morning meds will take you to 11am and then they want to order a new lunch tray because what they brought looks like a cardboard version of a tuna sandwich and smells rather like it’s been underneath someone’s car floor mat for a month-and for those who have a cold and can’t smell-it would amount to feeling like you’ve been out in the rain with your dog at the end of October for a week and you’ve just finished running 10 miles and then had a pile of old leaves placed on top of you to keep you warm and dry-after you were already wet!
So you decide to order a new lunch for your patient and instead of getting the dietary number you end up on a voice mail queue for the low-fat recipe of the month club! By 1pm you’ve ordered the lunch for the patient but it comes up as jello and a banana and the patient’s now hungry, tired and thinks you’re a moron who can’t even get a tuna sandwich right. Mild curse words are heard coming from under your breath, and the other nurses who understand your pain and suffering would offer to help if they weren’t already in their own hell!
So by 6pm you’re ready to quit, and leave the floor but you realize that it’s only 90 minutes until the Governor will release you from jail! And you can spread out giving report for 20 minutes and take a 30 second break in between to pee, drink your juice, take your own AM meds that you never had time for and eat your lunch/dinner before all your call lights go off and each patient wants you to personally give them their pain meds before shift change because they don’t want to have to wait until the next shift comes out of report. So by 8pm your meds are passed, charting is done, report is given and your people are breathing!
It’s time to go home and enjoy the 45 seconds of your evening before you collapse!
And after you wake up from you nap-semi rested-you shower, eat your dinner and go to bed. Realizing that you’re going back to your unit in the AM with the hope that all your work for your patients somehow made a difference in their life-whether you ever know of it or not.
Monday, November 17, 2008
