Happy Nurses Day

I got my ass handed to me on Nurses Day.

Management was cooking up flapjacks so me and a few others including a student or two headed on over. My unit director was cooking while some manager in a nurses hat and white uniform was handing out plates. Bitch, please! You mean you really saved your nursing school hat from 1966? Is that how you see nursing, still? Probably, but I digress.

So there was a two pancake limit which didn't deter us. The students had already eaten so they lined up and then handed us their dollar size pancakes. We proceeded on over to the next line and were greeted by this:


SAUSAGE POLICY: NO MORE THAN TWO SAUSAGES PER PERSON. NO EXCEPTIONS. SEE YOUR MANAGER FOR ANY QUESTIONS.


Good thing I got that great breakfast, huh? The shit storm was about to hit. Between the crazy drug seekers in Xanax withdrawal and the really sick people, the place was beginning to sound like a jet engine idling for take-off.

Add to the mix a crazy nurse who forgets to take her ADHD meds and starts getting really loud with the chaos, Crazy Town was heating up and she was the Mayor.

I had in my room one squirrely benzo withdrawal lady, one drunk guy who was talking non-stop, one sweet lady with a dickhead husband who kept telling her to shut her mouth, and the sick lady who came in with bleeding from a left femoral cath site.

Bleeding Fem lady looked like Caspar. She had been tubed in the field for Altered Mental Status and the presence of copious amounts of blood in her bed. Upon arrival, she did not have a pulse. She also had no line. I was alone, except for two nursing students, a paramedic student, the doctor with his scribe and The Mayor of Crazy Town who showed up to flirt with a few of the paramedics.

I throw the doc a central line kit and some gloves, I instruct one of the students to start CPR and I crack the code cart. The Mayor is running her mouth, bouncing all over the place and accomplishing nothing. Oh, and in the midst of the all this debauchery, she finds time to stand at the foot of the bed and send a text.

I kick her out of the room with a few expletives to express my displeasure, screw the fact I'm the only licensed nurse in the room. I'd rather have glued my eyelids shut with peanut butter than deal with her dumb ass.

Boom! I hear a crash and look through the curtain to see that my drunk dude has fallen on the floor and is curled up in a ball with some blood coming from his head. I call out to our illustrious Mr. Testosterone charge nurse who is busy surfing the internet and tell him I have a man on the ground. Bummer for him he has to get up off his fully-sized bowling ball butt. Xanax withdrawal is also practically hanging by her telemetry wires, nothing I can do at the moment, I turn my attention back to my code. I compliment the nursing student on her awesome CPR. She's a very serious girl, she barely looks my way.

It was too late for trauma blood, she was dead. I'm even more screwed now, because I know I'll spend the next 90 minutes give or take on the phone calling all the appropriate agencies. Not to mention, the screaming I get from her private doctors, none of whom will sign the death certificate. In the meantime, the sweet lady leaves and I'm still getting my beds filled with sick people.

I finish up the paper work in record time, console the family, hug the daughter, tag and bag and send her off to the morgue.

It's only three, I have four more hours of this. I'll spare you, needless to say an eerie calmness came over me and I tuned out all the loud noises. Maybe I was just hungry. I think I'll head over here: