Flying Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I think I've mentioned before, somewhere on this blog, about how bad morale has gotten on the floor.

It's gotten so bad, people I've never seen angry or snap in the nearly three years I've worked with them are so stressed out and shit on continually that they've actually started cracking, as evidenced by the fact that they're snapping left and right in situations when formerly mostly they'd just be convincing and nice and supportive and move forward.

I'm really not shocked by this behavior, because staffing has gotten so horrendous it gives everyone nightmares just to come into work, because we know we're going to be either working short staffed, floated, or both. The attitude shift saddens me greatly, because these are people I admire and respect for their good sense of humor, constant ability to move blithely forward through catastrophic staffing, and offer morale support and advice to new grads like myself. And I realize you can't always be nice--every one has their breaking point, and administrative policies and the constant fuck you, fuckover attitude towards our staffing ratios has always been bad, but now it's reaching in, grabbing ahold of our psyches and we're down for the collective count.

The floor used to be so much more cohesive and supportive, and now everyone's so stressed out and snipy and bitchy--these aren't the folks I remember working with as a new student. I still think highly of them, and I like them a great deal, but it just sucks to see everyone so angry and pissed off and distressed every single day. Every day is a bad day. And we go in knowing it could always be worse, and it usually does get worse, like the newly placed Vaxcell bleeding copiously in one room, with a newly placed PICC line bleeding two rooms over, simultaneously at change of shift.

All my work was done at 7p.m., I'm all trying to give report and get the hell out, and all of a sudden, I'm there until 8:30p.m. running around trying to get someone to care that my patient is bleeding through layers of bedding through a newly accessed site. And everyone's like, "Yeah, let's watch it for a half hour." As if it's going to spontaneously stop copiously bleeding, magically, on its own? Really? Where can I get that Harry Potter spell and wand, please, because I'd like to own one for situations like this and say, Reducto Hemmoraghia! or something pseudo-Latin and have the problem solved, without involving house officers that really don't want to come up on the floor and do anything, because we at [community hospital[ like "watching our patients" instead of treating them. "Watching our patients" is the preferred modality of treatment, apparently.

I've watched a lot of patients die this way. It's not fun.

It's like watching an ant colony being picked off slowly by ant eaters. Oops! There goes another one! Oops! And another!

Bleah. At least the deer ass carcass story was funny. It still doesn't ammeliorate being at work for 14 hours today, but whatever.