The Onion

So who says we’re eating out too much and not cooking enough at home? I found this onion on the counter last night while I was doing dishes…

…looks like it’s been there a little while huh?

I’m here!

Wooo! I’m actually posting! I better get on this posting business. I’ve completely been slacking.

So I skipped class tonight. For the first time since nursing school started… Tonight the teachers switched and it’s back to the teacher who reads the power points verbatim. I decided it would be more worthwhile for me to leave class after the test and read the chapters on my own… which of course I didn’t, BUT I did do the dishes and put in a load of laundry. Let me tell you it’s a damn good thing I came home because I completely forgot to put my scrubs in the washer before I left this morning! I would have been going to work all nakey tomorrow. We took that big hodgpodge test today so now I’m anxiously awaiting for them to post our grades. Cross your fingers!

The new job is going well still, I did run into a bossy/cranky LPN over the weekend. I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt but the more I think back on the various things she said to me the more rude she seems. Most of the nurses are really nice though and seem to genuinely appreciate having me around to do things. (Which in turn makes me offer to do more things for them) I did finally miss in the blood draws. Fortunately the woman prefaced the blood draw by saying “You’re going to have a hard time getting anything out of me because I haven’t had anything to eat or drink today”… I did miss (there was nothing there) but I switched the the other arm and got her right away. Whew. I hope they can’t see me sweating under my scrubs!

We really get the full gamut of patients which is good experience for me. I’ve already learned <u>not</u> to say “I’m here to take your vital signs” and instead come into their room and say I’m going to take their blood pressure and temperature… vital signs apparently sounds very scary to people.

The highlight of the last few days at work was I went to pick up a couple from ultrasound, no one is in the emergency room for good reasons so they were all worried about the fact she was pregnant and cramping/bleeding but I went to pick them up and they were all smiles because not only was everything fine but they found out the sex of the baby 2 weeks before their actual ultrasound appointment. They were PUMPED… SO excited, and it was so cute! (Not everyone coming through is happy to be pregnant)… It was a boy and they were showing me their ultrasound photos of the head and the boy parts and just gushing with happiness (the mom was gloating because she thought it was a boy and the dad thought girl)… It was hard not to smile for the rest of the night.

Happy Belated Thanksgiving!

I’m so lame! Good thing I lost NaBloPoMo early so I’m not still under pressure! This whole no-computer-at-work thing is KILLING me! Don’t worry, I’ve got two days off coming up where I will be doing nothing but studying and cruising the internet

Trust her, she’s a doctor…

-This was obviously written a while ago-

So our second year fellow swung by the lab today to pick up some primate specimens from the -80 freezer. I don’t have time now that I’m leaving to help her search for samples, so I pointed her in the right direction and left her to look while I went back to my computer for a bit. I went to check on her 10 minutes later and find the -80 freezer door open and the freezer alarming. I’m sure from her perspective it looked like I was a little off my rocker because I immediately started pointing and telling her to close the freezer! Quick! Now! I told her it was really important to keep the freezer closed because it’s remotely monitored and she would have facilities management jumping down her throat about a broken freezer in minutes.

“Well you should have told me I needed to shut the door”

Excuse me? It didn’t occur to you that if you leave the freezer door open the freezer might warm up? For real? And frankly this interaction makes me even more irritated by my bosses comment that she feels like she’s involved in nursery school research.

The first day

The first day went really well and I do have one funny story…

Because it’s a female health hospital (and for all I know they may do this is other ERs too) we universally collect a urine sample on entering. That urine is then subjected to a pregnancy test and dipped to see the content of all sorts of things (glucose, ketones, blood, yadda yadda yadda) This is one of my main functions. Urine tester. So I watched my preceptor do this once and show me all the paperwork that goes with it, then we did one together. It’s not complicated, just matching colors. My preceptor had to leave the unit for whatever reason and a new patient came in. The nurse brought the urine specimen back and I said “Would you like me to test that for you?” and she looked right at me in all seriousness and says, “Are you sure you feel comfortable testing this on your own?” I assured her it was no problem and while I was dipping the urine I was thinking to myself:

“This isn’t brain surgery, it’s a test they let you buy at the drugstore, conduct in your home bathroom and interpret it on your own… I think I’m up to the job”

New Job

So while I realize I’ve only worked two shifts now at the ED, I really like it. Everyone’s been really friendly and the tech training me those two shifts was really nice too. We had one medium day and one crazy day. The second day I got there at 7am and we had 5 patients already (which is unusual for this ED) and then I swear to you by 8:30am we had 19 patients… now this is a little ED so there’s only like 23 beds to begin with. We had about 5 patients arrive via ambulance within 30 minutes of each other.

I work in a mostly female health hospital, while it’s expanding that’s mostly what it’s known for so in the past two days we’ve had 2 male patients. Other than that I’ve seen everything from straight-to-OR cases right down to heavy period or yeast infection. I’m sure it will come has no surprise to Jen that the yeast infection case was the most obnoxious patient we had in a 48 hour period, ringing the call bell every 5 minutes and yelling down the hall loudly about how the service here was ridiculous and why was she waiting for 45 minutes for something so simple!!!! (I did ask the nurse if she had considered informing the patient that the wait would be a lot shorter at the CVS down the street) I also escorted a patient to and watched her CT scan, dropped off a few laboring women and assisted in a straight cath.

But so far I’m still glad I made the switch I’ve got to see all kinds of things already and I’m already half way finished with my phlebotomy sign off sheet. The hospital requires to draw 8/10 perfectly before you’re allowed to do it unsupervised. I’m still batting 1000 in the blood draws thank you very much.

By my 4th time yesterday I drew blood from a patient and while I was standing there labeling the tube she said “You’re really good at that, usually it hurts a lot more” I smiled real big at her and said “Thanks! That’s great to hear especially because it’s only my second day here” and her eyes got real big, lol!

Shorts

I was tagged by Ashley Benz to come up with 7 weird things about myself… I’m working on it, but I’m in too much of a fog today so it will have to wait.

A short postlet instead:

Today I had phlebotomy (blood drawing) class: the only exciting part of orientation I’m not sure how I’m going to keep which color tubes goes first for the time being but I’m sure that comes with practice. I got blood and successfully switched tubes on my first stick on a real live person. So relieved about that! She told me it didn’t hurt but I’m a little suspicious

This new schedule is going to take some getting used to as well. I’m EXHAUSTED. Completely and totally. I’m very glad I didn’t take a job at a different hospital because I think having to worry about stuff like parking and whatnot might just throw me over the edge… adjusting to punching a time clock and getting up at 5am instead of 6am is about all I can handle right now.

I’m completely zonked today after I got 6 hours of sleep last night and I will only get 5 tonight (unless by some miracle they let us out of clinical early tonight– so cross your fingers for me) So I’m not too happy I’m going to show up for my very first day on the unit at my very worst. I’m hoping the adrenaline of a new job and having a job where I’m busy will help me to overcome the all out fatigue.

Thank goodness I didn’t even try to wear my contacts today, my eyes are burning with fatigue already and it’s not even noon yet!

We’re done. Totally.

So the lab drama all started shortly after I decided I was leaving for the ED, and now I’m finally getting around to sharing it with you. I got paged to the OR to pick up a specimen and when I returned I walked into a meeting between my boss and my chinese co-worker (CCW) where she was going over with him which of my projects she wanted him to take over after I left. Since I walked in they asked me to join and started asking me a few questions about my procedures.

So these western blots I’ve been running over the course of the past 3.5 years are part of an absolutely enormous project about menopause and pelvic floor disorders my boss collects tissue from surgeries and we analyze it for different kinds of proteins. In order to make this work over the long term my boss has it set up to use cultured cells from a select one or two patients made in mass. We use the same exact amount from the same exact patient on every single gel we run so we can compare all of them with each other. CCW is in charge of cell culture in the lab so whenever I needed additional control samples he just handed them over.

When she started asking me about my controls I brought out my big binder where I keep all my records. I started pulling out the codes for my controls and my boss almost immediately started flipping out. I had just copied the codes my ccw gave me, I didn’t really know what they meant, but I learned that the codes meant that ccw, rather than giving me a control sample, was giving me whatever random tubes he didn’t need. Without regard to what patient they came from or what hormone treatment they had received. I was livid. My boss was livid. He ruined 3.5 years of data.

But what further infuriated both me and my boss was that he sat there and continued to make excuses. He tried to say “oh but those aren’t my cells they’re Cathy’s” (the woman I replaced 3.5 years ago). My boss said, well then you can just use her cells to finish the project” and then discovered that my coworker had let those cell lines die out and started his own. Which is a huge no-no in research as you’re required to keep everything you publish a paper on for at least 5 years after publication. “Not mine, they’re Cathy’s”… ugh. So then as this heated discussion went on he changed to “but I just gave her those cells for a pilot test” “just for a pilot test” “pilot test” and I finally busted out (with an extremely angry tone) “do you mean to tell me you honestly thought I was doing pilot tests for THREE AND A HALF YEARS?!” UGH. My boss wasn’t going for it either. She said “CCW, we don’t DO pilot tests here, we’re WAY past that”….

That was a Monday. I was so angry with him I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him the rest of the day or the next day. And I’ll admit, at first I felt a little guilty for being so angry. We had a great relationship for the past three years and I was leaving for good in like 2 weeks. Was I really going to spend the next two weeks angry with him and ruin our relationship.

Then the day after I came in in the morning to find this email in my inbox that he sent to my boss and CCd me on:

[Boss].
I am hesitating should I let you know or not, I frankly don’t want to cause anyone any trouble, but I am facing a big trouble of not being able to get good result from enzyme activity assay on tissues. Tuesday, I happened to see the Monday’s tissue specimens sitting in the 4C, I realized this is probably why I got very low collagenase activity from tissue of 50mg (the extraction buffer was confirmed to be of high salt). After 24 hours, most live enzymes in tissue should be gone. And today’s specimen is in 4C too after [SSFB] left. I am processing it now. I don’t know how many specimens were processed in such delayed manner, hopefully, not many.
[SSFB],
I am not trying to upset you as we’ve been working together for years, but I don’t want to be blamed for bad activity data or failure in activity assay due to inappropriate tissue processing. I feel bad to have to let [Boss] know.
[CCW]

Oh I was livid. I wanted to take the specimen and throw it at him when he came in that morning. I decided then that yes our relationship truly was over. –So it’s a good thing that he already gave me his wife’s NCLEX practice CDs– I wanted to say, “oh well thank god superman-ccw will be completely responsible for everything in the lab two weeks from now to save it from disaster”. Because I don’t mind telling you that in the past two weeks my boss has voiced on more than one occasion that her biggest concern with me leaving is now he’s going to be in charge and she doesn’t trust him to be responsible for anything. Then I saw my boss had responded:

Thanks [CCW]. It is important to process the samples within 2 hours of receiving them. I am hopeful that the vast majority of samples are treated this way. At the same time, if they are chilled overnight, enzyme activity should still be preserved. Actually, I have mostly noticed specimens left at 4 degrees when [SSFB] is not around. I still think you should be getting enzyme activity – I have done zymography on these specimens and have been able to get an active enzyme. The saline is mostly bad for the biomechanics assays. Lets do this – specimens received during the day until 3 pm will be [SSFB] responsibility. Thereafter, [CCW] will be in charge. All specimens must be processed as soon as possible after receiving them. [CCW], I will need to see you dissect off the epithelium. When [SSFB] is gone, [CCW] will be in charge of all specimens – you will need to wear the beeper. Thanks.

…She added those last few sentences because the week before she called me in huge distress in the morning because no one had picked up the specimen the afternoon before and it was discarded by the OR. She asked me if I gave CCW the pager. I said I did, and I really wished she would have followed that up with “Well did you tell him to answer the pager”… because I would really have liked to reply “no, but he’s 39 years old and this is his 4th year working in the lab so I feel like I shouldn’t have to”… because honestly, if you’re the only person in a room, and a pager goes off, do you think you might be inclined to answer it? I would think so. Obviously CCW doesn’t.

Anyway, that morning my boss came in before CCW and we had a nice discussion before he arrived and our conversation pretty much went like this:

“so when did this big rivalry between you and ccw start” and I said “well I’ve barely been able to bring myself to talk to him since last Monday when I found out he didn’t think my westerns were important enough to warrant an actual control and he could just give me whatever tubes he didn’t need” and she said “I know, but clearly he’s on the attack with you right now so I was just wondering if something else I wasn’t aware of had happened” and I said “no, not that I’m aware of” and she said “Because I tried to answer his email in a very diplomatic fashion but to be honest I’ve only ever noticed specimens not processed when you’re not around and he’s correcting you for something I think I’ve only ever reprimanded him for” … so we chatted for a while and she said she’s really worried about him taking over this enormous menopause database that I’m in charge of and I guess he’s a reviewer for some grant application and sent her this email about how he spent ALL weekend working on it (which, you never want to bitch to Boss about how much time you’re spending on work) and he needed her to review it all before he sent it in and she said “which kind of defeats the purpose of him being an independent reviewer doesn’t it? I just don’t know what to do with him, he’s just so cocky and so incredibly below average… but if I fired him now I’d have no one in the lab…. of course I’d probably get a lot more of these papers written, haha”….

That day she sent ccw and the punk new kid (who is growing on me) an email telling them that I’m in charge and they have to listen to me. (maniacal laugh). That hasn’t worked very well, but it is kind of nice knowing that my boss is totally on my side and has my back. So that’s the official version of the drama between me and ccw. I’m still only talking to him when I absolutely have to, and my irritation level is at an all time high with him. Nearly everything he says to me makes me want to beat him. I won’t, cause I don’t roll like that. But I did really get the urge to throw a nice hunk of stinky monkey vagina at him today.

Week 11

I just opened up my Nursing School website to print this weeks powerpoints. We are finally on Week 11 of 15 *and all the angels in heaven sing down upon us* and found 7 random powerpoint presentations for me to download and print for class. So far we’ve had tests on “Cardiac disorders” “Respiratory disorders” and “Neurological disorders”… I think the offical title of our next test will be “Random Shit” because this week I’m printing information on:
HIV
Anaphylaxis
TB
Hepatitis
Food born illness
Systemic Lupus
and last but certainly not least:
Rheumatoid Arthritis

November

Welcome to November and NaBloPoMo, Sorry I haven’t done an official start to NaBloPoMo quite yet (not that it matters now since I blew it Saturday) but my life has been downright insane for the past week. In just the past 7 days:

1. 3 big wrap-up projects my boss assigned (That I have as of yet to begin)
2. Our IRB renewal that is apparently overdue that my boss only told me about on Monday (I was approximately 130 patient files behind in the database -good god- it took me 5 days of nonstop demographics entering to catch up. I even missed lunch break twice!)
3. Then there is the rise in blood pressure anytime I’m within earshot of my coworker (I didn’t forget the story, it’s coming)
4. Our lab is moving. MOVING. This week. We have to pack up our entire lab to be relocated. Figures this move would occur my very last week in the lab… so much for those three big wrap up projects, ehh?
5. My big cardiac/respiratory test last Monday that I spent the ENTIRE weekend studying for. (I got a 90%)
6. Tuesday night I had to do my ATI practice tests for Wednesday.
7. Wednesday we had our mental health ATI and Pharm tests, I passed both and do not have to remediate thank goodness, because I just don’t think I could handle one more task right now
8. My newish (July ‘06) car has an oil leak that needs an appointment
9. Hubbin can’t breathe so we missed Halloween in favor of an emergency allergist appointment. Which is fine because I forgot to buy candy anyway.
10. Thursday night our clinical instructors kept us on the floor till 11:30p, THEN we had post-conference… I didn’t even get home until after midnight then still had to take a shower because I was covered in miscellaneous patient grossness.
11. Saturday I spent the entire day at a free NCLEX review course hosted by the largest medical corporation in my area. I was completely bitter about being there but I have to admit it was way more useful than I expected it to be especially since I don’t intend to shell out any money for one of those big Kaplan courses or anything.
12. And finally Sunday (yesterday) I forced Hubbin to attend his cousin’s 11th birthday party on his own because I feel like I have not be *at home* for more than a week, and I just desperately needed some “personal time”. I’m typing this while I’m taking a break from switching out my summer/winter clothes. Finally! brrr!
13. Which speaking of “brr” Hubbin, the heat nazi, has decided that the furnace and vents are to blame for him suffocating so in a fit of experimentation he TURNED OFF OUR FURNACE! Then managed to sleep for 12 hours straight so has forbid me from turning it back on. We’re heating our house with just our gas log fireplace right now and have two furnace-people estimates next week. If there’s not a new furnace and clean vents in this house by next weekend I’m packing a bag and moving to my parents until this place warms up.
14. I just sent my second email in my third attempt to contact the Emergency Department unit director so that hopefully SOMEONE will respond to me and tell me when I’m supposed to be starting now that my first official day is only a week away. I’ve finally decided: “That’s it, if no one tells me when to come I’m just not coming” I’ve sent him two emails (which he said is the best way to contact him) and left him one voicemail (5 days ago) and I’ve got NOTHING.
15. Now I’ve got to rush to do all my med-surg paperwork because I’ve not touched it once and it’s ALL due in the next two weeks.

So those are my excuses for dropping out of the NaBloPoMo race only 3 days into it! I promise I still read all your blogs and I will continue to use the spirit of NaBloPoMo to post more often this month than last month… just bear with me