Hospital O'Hare

I've been a nurse for awhile, and after a few years, like any other job, I've exhausted the opportunity for new and unique experiences. Most of what I do everyday on the job is like what I do every other day on the job. As monotonous as that sounds, at least these ordinary experiences are fun and interesting to me.

That said, I experienced a "first" a few days ago.

When I started working as a nurse, I was on a medical-surgical unit. This is the main nursing floor in most hospitals, a place where patients stay for awhile, either with an illness that is not quickly treated or after surgery, recovering.

What I liked about this sort of nursing was the familiarity of patients from day to day. Often I would have the same four or five patients for days at a time. The length of time I had with them allowed me to build reporte, often finding out more about their ordinary lives, their likes and dislikes, what made them tick. This amount of time also gave me a greater opportunity to influence their thoughts about health habits and how they might change their behaviors to encourage and maintain maximum health.

But this consistency also had some draw backs, the most depressing of which was taking care of really obnoxious patients for days at a time.

In the emergency room, however, I see patients for maybe a couple of hours, half a shift at most (6 hours). This means I see more patients and a greater variety of patients in each twelve hours I work. The trade-off is I also have less opportunity to chat, figure them out, influence their health-related choices.

Not so the other day.

The other day I received report on a patient from the night nurse--the patient had arrived at 0545--and I duly reported off on the very same patient to the very same night nurse twelve hours later. In all, the patient spent fifteen hours in our ER, long enough to develop new symptoms that she hadn't even come in with! That was a first for me.

I attribute this to a scatter-brained, passive-aggressive ER doctor, an internist by training who has no sense of time-management and who has to fix everything about a patient (and sometimes their families!) This doc had patients circling for hours that day--my patient wasn't the only one--like "Discharged from ER" was a busy airport where patients couldn't land. I've seen worse up-in-the-air at O'Hare!

And it was an overtime shift for me...