So back to the part where I said there were only 5 patients in the ICU. We normally should have 13 dying people dammit, but I’ll settle for a couple. Means I can have more coffee breaks I guess.

So after restraining myself from force feeding a hypoglycemic man cream of wheat, I was caught by a nurse and asked if I could run an extra orange juice into a room.  As this is a task that I’m in no way overqualified for, I happily agree and find a fridge with orange juice in it to bring to her room. The orange juice, not the fridge. 

So I get in the room and hand the OJ to a beautiful 50 year woman who looked thrilled to be getting a beverage. As I unwrapped the straw, she asked, “How is the lady from last night doing?” And I’m like, “Oh, who?, I can find out for you,” thinking she was talking about another ICU patient. She’s like, “Well, she was trying to fix something under the house. I don’t know why she was trying to fix something in her condition, but she can be obstinate sometimes so I guess she’ll do what she wants.”

And I’m following so far.

“So she goes under there to fix the whatever she’s trying to fix and she brings her kid down there with her, and I didn’t think it was a good idea, but who am I to say. So she goes down there and then she’s stuck and I just got so so so scared.” And I could tell. This lady was so so worried.  “I just want to find out if the woman is ok. I was so scared with her down there with her child and being all covered in bugs. Covered in bugs and stuck, how awful.”

“I had to run across the street to get help. I broke a window to try to get someone to help me. I didn’t have time to put any clothes on before I ran to get help. And when my neighbor finally let me call the fire department and they came, all they wanted to do was talk about me. They wouldn’t listen to me about the pregnant lady stuck under my house. So…I just want to know…Is She OK?”

Now, I was all with her and concerned up until about halfway through the story. But then was all smarted up in the end. Pregnant ladies under houses don’t get covered in bugs, this is California after all. We don’t have bugs here.  

But this lady is legitimately concerned. And I’ve been there before, being hyper paranoid about dumb shit. First time I smoked weed, I thought that the entire party was just trying to take pictures of me. Like that was the ENTIRE purpose of them inviting me was to get me fucked up and then take pictures. It may be a delusion, but it is non the less really really REAL to the person experiencing the delusion.

I assured her by saying, “Hey, I know some firemen (which I don’t). And they are REALLY good at their jobs. If you called the firemen, they have no doubt found whoever was under your house. Firemen and paramedics are the kind of people who are exceptionally good at their jobs.”

She liked this. She believed in my belief in the integrity of firemen.

Turns out since we didn’t have very many dying people,we had some overflow from psych.  But this I hadn’t known until now. And maybe 15% of me was thinking, what if there really is a stuck pregnant lady under a house in Van Nuys, CA who was RIGHT NOW covered in bugs.  So I had to sneak a peek at her chart which assured me with the letters ALOC. Which my iPhone says means “Altered Level of Consciousness.”  Breathing a sigh of relief, I was able to move onto more productive things such as punching holes in paper.  (3 hole punching – this is no joke).

Later the lady’s husband came in and gave the run down on her situation. Basically, she had not been taking her anti-depressant/bipolar medication for the last three days and had been declining until the seizure and ALOC that had brought her into the hospital. Supposedly the story goes that she liked to use her medications early on in the month to get high and then would run out of medications by the end of the month.  She had had a history of severe mental and physical abuse at the hands of her parents, and she and her sister had never been the same. Either nurture or nature, she was fucked.

Basically, the husband really cared a lot and was trying to convince the doctor to let HIM handle his wife’s medications because he thought it was silly that his addict wife should have access to her own addict medication.  Makes sense up front, but you could tell the doc was suspicious regardless. Nobody knows who to trust. Everyone wants to just do what’s right.

After the discussion of the husband with the doctor, the husband steps in the room, and the red headed lady says, “Are they gonna be ok??” And the husband says, “Yeah, they alright, see you later sweetie, get better.”

My second trip to the ICU came after a two week hiatus in which I had allergies/a cold/sinus infection followed by a sudden onslaught of laryngitis after a particularly upsetting episode of the Bachelorette.

I wasn’t incapacitated sick, but I was definitely unsure of if I should be in an ICU even remotely sick. This is a new game for me.

I walk in and begin my morning chores like setting up patient billing cards in the inventory room and filing away patient lab reports in their charts.  This went pretty quick seeing that there were only 5 patients.  I was a little stunned. Average headcount is 13 in the ICU. 

I spent the first half of the morning trying to convince a hypoglycemic man to eat some toast to raise his blood sugar levels.  About 15 minutes in, he started listing off excuses as to why he couldn’t eat.  He was tired, he had heartburn, he had cramps.  These might have been legitimate complaints, or they might not have been. And Of course I can’t force him to eat, and I felt like a total failure. It’s different from consulting in that I can’t just deliver you an entity relationship diagram and call the day a success.  In nursing, the deliverables are less concrete.  Was my deliverable that he eat 50% of his meal or was my deliverable just my actual effort to get him to eat 50% of his meal.  In one, I’m a failure, in the other I’m a success.   And how is actual effort measureable?

I’m beginning to realize that in health care it is harder to manipulate the variables involved in making my day a success.

Spoiler alter. I’m gonna complain about religious people.

*****

I never fret about getting the shifts I want at the hospital.  The shifts I desire are always Sunday morning shifts. Mainly because I view this as a time when I would otherwise be sleeping.  It’s hidden time, freely available hours that won’t take away from another part of my life.  I’ve never had a hard time getting this shift. In fact, when the ICU volunteer team passed around the shift sign up sheet, I let everyone else get anxiously grab at the sheet. I waited until the end before I even took a look at it, and sure enough, every single Sunday morning shift was still open.  I work with a lot of Catholics. Either that, or all the other atheists like to work during the middle of the week.

So back track a few weeks to about the midway point of my rotation in the medsurg department.  I walk in to work, and notice that I don’t recognize a lot of the nurses and CNAs. People seem unfamiliar.  I normally work with the same basic group of staff, but today was different.  In the break room, I asked a nurse that I recognized who all the new people were.  He said, “Oh, those are just the people that were on call to come in if someone called out sick.” Then he added, “It’s Easter Sunday.” 

So Catholics. You’re welcome. You’re welcome, that the godless covered for you while you lied your way out of helping sick people so that you could go love on Jesus.  You’re welcome that somehow patients got their morphine, bandages were changed, hygiene was maintained so you could go get mouth herpes out of your nasty communal wine.  You’re welcome that some of us have chosen not to believe in God, so that you can go believe in God.  What the hell would have happened if we were ALL Christians. Isn’t that what you claim to want.  But then who would take care of the SICK PEOPLE while we are all at church??

I talked to the secretary, who I’d never seen before. She was hoping she wouldn’t have been called in on Easter, because to her it was Armenian Genocide day. But she came in, to cover for the Catholic who called out.

I’m not here getting mad at people who call out sick when they aren’t.  I’ve done it before, and have been on my way to Vegas.  The mad comes in because Christians like to claim they are better than the rest of us. That they lie less, that they have the “fruits of the Spirit,” that they are more moral, that they help the sick more.  That’s the problem. For the same reason it’s a problem when priests complain that their sexual abuse stats aren’t any worse than the rest of the world’s sexual abuse statistics.  Well, they SHOULD be much better stats if you’re claiming to be more moral than the rest of us. I AM evil sometimes. But so are the Christians.

Call out sick. I don’t give a fuck.  We’ll gladly cover for you when you lie about being sick, just like you will gladly cover for me when I lie about being sick.  But you HAVE to stop pretending that being a Christian gives you the right to be snooty about your supposed predisposition to morality.

Where I work, hospital staff is busy all of the time.  The nurses and CNAs aren’t  sitting around surfing the internet. They are truly working their asses off. However, despite their hard work, they have more things to attend to than they have time.  In addition, they see people like you every day. To them, you aren’t anything special. Even though you just woke up with an amputated arm, to the nurses, you are just another drugged up body lying in a hospital bed. You can’t be special to them, because then everybody would have to be special to them. 

This disconnectedness can be very cruel to the patient whether or not the situation actually is cruel. To treated as an animal, as a number, as a part of an assembly line.  The disconnectedness of the staff is compounded by the fact that you aren’t really behaving like a human. You are drugged up and miserable, and you look like hell.

Sometimes the disconnectedness can take a darker turn. It sucks and it breaks my heart to see people crushed by the potential (and rare at my place of employ) indignities of the hospital. CNAs who don’t pull curtains around when they help a person with a bedpan.  Patients in agony who have to wait for their pain medication because their nurse is on a break, and all the other nurses have their own emergencies.  It sucks, and in healthcare, things that suck, suck a lot more than it sucks in other industries. A barista handing you a cup of old coffee is a lot more forgivable than a nurse forgoing to change your bloody bed sheets because she was busy.

Customer service jobs are about prioritization.  You can’t make pizzas, take money, and bus tables at the same time. Nurses have infinite things to prioritize. And you are part of that list of things.  And you need to bump yourself up on that list. In addition you have to FIGHT to not be treated as a product.  You need to take an active role in humanizing yourself to hospital staff. 

Here’s what you can do to keep yourself from being treated like a lump of flesh while you lie in a hospital recovering from your surgery.

1.  Flowers – And the more the better. Trust me. This is the biggest signal to hospital staff that someone gives a shit about the patient.  I don’t care if your ailing mother has been in and out of the hospital for the last 5 years.   You need to send her flowers  --EVERY--TIME--  she is admitted. Flowers advertise that a person is actively loved. Nurses don't want angry friends and family. If you don’t have friends and family sending you flowers, send yourself some flowers.  It’s important.

(If this seams wasteful, buy plants instead of flowers then take them home afterwards.)

2.  Resist wearing the hospital provided gown and pants – But only if you can get away with it.   Bring and wear your own clothes. You might not be able to follow this if you have IVs and tubes hanging everywhere. But the point is that you don’t want to look like every other patient in that hospital. You don’t want to be just another miserable animal wearing a blue sheet with snaps.  You want to look like an individual. 

3.  Put up pictures of yourself when you were healthy – Bring in frames, and set them up around the room. Nothing humanizes a drugged up lump of flesh more than a picture of the same lump with makeup and pretty hair running around in a field with three kids.  If the patient is super, super old, pictures are especially important. 

4.  Act lucid – If you can. Don’t spend 8 hours a day staring into the hallway or watching TV.  You don’t have to act like an intellectual.  Just grab a People magazine about the royal couple and read it or just stare at William and Kate’s pretty faces.  Talk on your cell phone.  Play crossword puzzles and word finds.  Acknowledge people who walk into the room. It’s easy for a nurse to down prioritize a person who isn’t acting aware of their surroundings.

5. Know the names of the individuals on your patient care team  -- Ask for names when people come into your room.  When you ask, don’t be all cliché and say, “Awe, that’s such a pretty name.” Fifty people have already said that to your nurse this month.  Just look thoughtful and file the information away. Write it down. Use it.  I answer call buttons on a regular basis.  When a patient requests, “Please send Sheila to my room,” instead of “Can you call my nurse?” The effect is much more authoritative and indicates that the patient is aware of surroundings.

6. Insist on basics – If you smell, that’s bad. If your sheets haven't been changed in 4 days, that’s bad. If someone decides to change your diaper with the door open, that’s bad.   Asking for these things to be fixed doesn't make you needy, it makes you human. I’m sometimes appalled at how insecure patients can be in demanding they be treated well.  The patient care team has an infinite list of things to do, but you need to be an ACTIVE part of being at the top of that list.

In the end it boils down to – You will be treated better if you are lucid and loved. If you aren’t either of those things, do your best to fake it.

The other day I was posted on suicide watch at the hospital. Any time a person in the hospital threatens to take their own life, a staff member is assigned to watch them for the entirety of their stay at the hospital.

The RN on duty needed to take her lunch break, and since the patient can’t be left alone for even a second, I was lassoed into sitting outside this patient’s open door.   Instructions for this position are, “yell help if he tries anything” and “don’t ever leave this spot.” Done and done.  I sat in a comfy chair and played angry birds for 20 minutes.

Yes, that’s the entirety of the story. If you wanted it to be more interesting, shame on you.

At my volunteer job, I’ve been notified that I’ve been moved departments from pre/post op into the ICU. I start in June. 

Today we had our basic training.  No pushups involved. Major differences between the previous department and the ICU seem to be.

1.  There are three crash carts on the floor instead of one.  We’ve been instructed that our part as a volunteer in a code blue is to “get out of the way.”   “Getting out of the way” wasn’t covered in my CPR course, however.  So who knows how I’m going to respond.

2.  Visitors are monitored much more carefully.  The department is locked down. Visitors must be granted access, no children are allowed, and no more than two visitors at a time are allowed in rooms unless a patient is on their death bed.

3.  We REALLY are not allowed to have much patient contact in this department due to the critical state of the patients. Therefore, many of our duties seem to be more secretarial in nature.  That won’t make for good stories, but hopefully some drama will go down regardless.  Maybe I’ll get to tell a story about how we ran out of orange copy paper.

I visited my first med school. The Medical University of South Carolina. MUSC.

MUSC accepts mostly South Carolina natives. But they also will accept out-of-staters with “ties to the area.” Thankfully, I have an aunt and uncle and a set of awesome grandparents just sitting there in Charleston waiting to be my “ties.”  Also, with declining subsidies from the state, MUSC plans on increasing out of state admissions (because we pay more).

Our tour guide James had just finished his first year there and drove in special to give us a t0ur. Seems he owed the dean’s office a favor.  The campus was pretty deserted as the semester had just wrapped up, the first years had finished their finals and were on break for the summer.

He was a nice little talker and my BFF and I were aggressive with our question asking, so there was not a lot of down time in that hour long walk around campus. We saw some lecture halls, simulation labs, libraries, anatomy labs, and dining areas.

James was hesitant about taking us to the gross anatomy lab. He was like “Well, we don’t have any safety gear on. And if I get caught, I’ll be lectured cause I should have known better.” But he let us in anyway because that seemed like an essential part of a medical school tour.  The gross anatomy lab contained about 30 dead bodies covered in individual black tarps. I don’t know what I expected walking in there. But it was jarring.  He mentioned that some people find the gross anatomy lab an emotional place. And I was like, “yeah…” letting my voice trail off.   I found it more than a little disconcerting for sure.

I had  concurrently been reading a fictional book (The Good Thief) which was tangentially about a couple of men hired to dig up recently dead bodies so that a surgeon could teach his pupils about anatomy. Apparently, from 1742 till 1832, this was a relatively common practice.  The practice officially ended with the Anatomy Act in 1832 even though it wasn’t really legal to begin with.  Today, med schools are still not allowed to purchase dead bodies, and all specimens must be donated.

We asked questions about “the day in the life of.” Which he answered, “class from 8 to 12, lab till 4, study in the evening. But you get used to it.”  We asked about the cost of living, to which he replied, “Well, if you want to live in a NICE place, you could go over there next to campus and pay $$…” And he names a price that’s the exact same cost as the PoS apartment that I live in now (in Los Angeles). So at least if I get in to school in South Carolina, I can expect a decent living conditions upgrade from my current apartment for about the same price.

Charleston is beautiful and the med school school seemed great. The tour guide raved about how much the staff wants you to succeed. (Apparently 90% of the students have private tutors that are provided by the school (included in tuition)). My close family is nearby and so is their super cuddly miniature poodle.  The school is also decently close to my big sister, who I could visit on weekends.  And gaining entrance into this university seems attainable.  I could really be happy there. It’s fo sho going on the list of places to apply.