If a Tree Falls on an Attending in the Forest, Would S/he Notice It?

I copped that title from one of my nurse friends, and I don't mean to diss attendings but... oh, the hell with pretense, yes I do.

I like some of them. Some of them appear to care about their patients, and others really do care about their patients. The rest of them should retire, sell bariatric equipment, go into acting careers on soap operas, or just go away somewhere and not come back. For when I see their names on the Kardex of my patients, I immediately hope it's just some bullshit admission and nothing is seriously wrong with the patient, because if there is, Lord help us.

I just learned from another one of my nursing friends that that nice crack using lady I was talking about in my other post not only peed on him (I think she was unconscious and lost bladder control) but also was intubated and sent to the unit.

Now, sometimes these things simply happen, and there's not a lot you can do about it.

On the other hand, sometimes you have attendings/house officers/residents/interns who really do seem to have their head stuck up their asses and ignore the warning signals. These aren't subtle warning signs, either. These are warning signs that a nurse with less than a year's experience can see from report without even going in to assess the patient.

I'm not going to say who I suspect the attending was, but it wouldn't surprise me if I was right, because if so, thats two intubations in one week. That's got to be a fucking record on this floor.

That's all I'm going to say about that one but it made me sad to hear that about her. I really liked her, and was hoping I could take care of her again, even though I noticed she looked about 100% worse than her last admission, and that was only like three days ago at the time.

In other news, my now friendless rabbit seems to be very, very bitter and depressed about losing her pal, even though that pal tried to gouge out her eye/kill her. She's been scrabbling around in her cage, tossing around her diet coke box (empty, of course) to prove she's one angry bunny, and giving me dirty looks like, "Fuck you, bitch! It's all your fault I don't have my best friend around." Either that, or she's looking like one of those pathetic children being exploited on Feed The Children campaigns. I feel bad, but seriously, I don't want to have to explain to my landlord why there's rabbit blood stains all over the walls and carpet.

Dog has also mastered the art of looking pathetic and put out, but he's ten years old, I think domesticated canines have been bred from birth to activate the sympathy/mothering gene in their human pets. I've deciphered several versions of the "Poor, dying me" Piper look. There's the "No one cares about me, I'm going to waste away if I don't get another doggie cookie" look and then there's the "I"m so abused and depressed, the last time I got a new play toy was fifteen minutes ago." He actually appears to have intermittent lethargy of the aged, because half the time he's asleep, the other half he's staring at me as if to say telepathically, "Get off your arse and feed/walk/play with me." This is the look I"m getting now. He's even come over and sat on my laptop keyboard a couple of times as I"m typing just to prove his point about how important he is and how lame my activities are. He's also taken to licking his paws as a way to get attention, then look pathetic and put out and abused when I scoled him, so I feel like a guilty dog mom.

I really like Jesus. He rolls around in his rolly-ball thing, and then when he gets tired of it, he sits and tries to chew his wa out, then I put him back in his tupperware cage, and he tries to chew his way out of that for about five minutes, gets bored, waddles over to eat some hamster chow, and then decides that's enough activity for the day and goes back to sleep. I like him, he's a very low maintenance kind of divinity. I've yet to see him do anything fantastic like walk on water or provide his own hamster chow for masses of hamster disciples, but we've only had him for a day or two, maybe he just needs to get adjusted to his new home before he can whip out the hamster super powers and perform miracles. I'll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, I've been sleeping a lot, for the first time in about a month. I would be a lot more sane and healthy if I wasn't a practicing floor nurse. I still have no appetite, but my dreams lately haven't involved any codes, thank God. They have, however, been oddly realistic, so much so that I wonder sometimes when I wake up if I dreamt it, or it really happened. Uh oh. My dream world is blurring into my reality, and vice versa.

This has been a really boring, inane post. I'm sorry, but I don't do anything objectively interesting with my life other than torture myself with ethical dilemmas/short staffing/idiot employees at work, and then sleep to recover from the torture. It's getting to be a very psychically dangerous cycle.

I'm dreaming of vacation. Vacation somehow includes a time warp version, where I go back to my college days of fun, happy poverty. Now it's just miserable, work-related poverty.

You'd think I would have spent this time off reading, or something. I'm getting dumber by the day. It's sad, really.