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.