Day From Hell and Back

Oh great. My first day on a new blog and I'm already bitching.

You know those days when you get home (2 hours late) and your feet are throbbing, you haven't eaten all day (never mind peed!) and the frustrations of the day are so numerous that you don't even dare start telling your loved one about your day... Yeah, it was one of those. And to make it worse, it was my day off.

I get a call around 1 pm asking if I could come in to help. I don't know why I picked the damned phone up. I know better.

At work, every room was full, but I was fresh and I like a little action. I was assigned a sweet, young couple having thier first baby. She was hurting but didn't want anything for the pain. How cute, I thought, another one of those... Needless to say, she quickly changed her mind and the anesthesiologist came in to do the epidural. We were sitting up on the side of the bed, in the middle of the procedure, when the charge nurse busts in the room, telling us that a tornado was in the very close vicinity and all patients were being moved into the hallway as a precaution. I looked out the window and saw a heavy blanket of dark clouds laying over the sky. Right in the middle was a thick portion of the cloud, dropping to the earth.

Ok, if that thing comes any closer or starts rotating any more than it is, maybe I'll react, I thought, but in the meantime, I just hate pushing beds arounds with patients in them with foot-long needles sticking out of their backs!

As I watched (yeah, I was paying more attention to the weather than to the patient) the cloud quickly dissipated, but from the nurses desk, I could hear the clerk in a frenzy. She was on the phone with her husband. Their windows had just blown out and the family was in the bathtub!

As we finished up the epidural, the storm passed us and we did not go into the hallway to join the rest of the women. Thank-God!

I come out to find a 33 week pregnant woman, Marie, in preterm labor. She'd been waiting for me to see her since I had gone in to do the epidural. It was over an hour ago (I know, everlasting epidural). The unit is overflowing. So, expecting an irritated patient, I walk into the room, introduce myself and ask Marie to lay back so that I can connect her to the fetal monitor. She lets out a very loud, very rude, exasperated moan. Oh, I'm so sorry to inconvenience you!

"I have to eat. I haven't had anything to eat since 10 am. I'm starving." She's clearly irritated.

One look at her and I'm thinking: Ignorant girl, I wouldn't worry. You could live off those reserves for quite a while! But instead I politely and professionally tell her to wait until I've done an assessment.

She doesn't stop. She lights into a littany of complaints - how this hospital sucks, how she's not even supposed to be here, how her doctor lied to her, how this is all just so inconvenient - ending with "I need to eat." Like I'm going to get you something now! She turns to the woman who came in with her "Go to the cafeteria and get me some food." I tell her the cafeteria is not open for 15 more minutes. "I knew I should have gone to X (next town over)," she mutters.

I try to be patient and understanding, but honestly, I'm here on my day off, helping out and I am in no mood to be treated like some piece of trash. "I beg your pardon?" I ask. She repeats it. I want to slap her fat, ignorant, sullen face. Instead I set everything down and walked out of the room. I can be pushed and pushed, but every once in a while it's too far. I'm going to snap. I get out to the nurses desk and start going off. When I actually look around me, I notice the nurses are all staring at me with eyes open a little more than usual... then I see why. The freaking CEO is standing there taking it all in. Oh, freaking CRAP.

Now, I figure the only way to maintain my integrity in this is to just continue my tirade. So I finish up and trade patients with another nurse. Bless her heart! For real!

It's not 10 minutes later that the phone rings. It's the ER. There's a patient in the ER, crowning. HUH?! This never happens, but I swear it's moments like this that we live for! Along with the charge nurse, I run down to the ER. The girl, Rosa, is lying on a stretcher, her legs wide open with the baby's head definitively crowning! Gathered around the bed are about 10 people, only one with the sense enough to have gloves on. The ER physician is standing at the end of the bed (big no-no, Dude, you want to get schmucked?!) without his gloves on. Someone's trying to start an IV. This all tickles us to no end, because it was such a stereotypical scene.

I think I literally hip-checked the ER Doc out of the way. Rosa was screaming, her head flung back, eyes closed. "Open your eyes, Rosa. Look at me." She quickly pulled it together and with one push, delivered the baby's head. I pulled the cord from around the baby's neck and cut the cord. The placenta quickly followed. Beautiful delivery. LOVE that! We took Mom and Babe up to L&D for recovery.