You Capture: Shapes!

This past weekend was amazing.  A mini college reunion where a group of us flew out to Wisconsin to help another friend celebrate her birthday.

We were the annoying people on the plane who were laughing an talking and playing uno at 530 in the morning.  A lot of caffeine was consumed that day.

While there we went to the Milwaukee Discovery World (which was way cool) and saw many shapes…

As a Kansas girl I am glad that shape is confined in a clear tube and not out in the field headed towards my house…

Jellyfish have got to be the weirdest thing ever.  Where is their brain?  Blood?  Nerves?  Do they have any of those things?  They are very round… not sure I knew that. 

And what would a girl’s weekend be without a Hersey's town square full of melted chocolate and surrounded by blocks of pineapple and angel food cake, round pretzel sticks and marshmallows and fresh strawberries?

I have been blessed with friends in many shapes and sizes, and I thank God for each and every one of them!

(part of the you capture series over at I should be folding laundry)

My night to music

I am tired. Behind on charting. I have a manic patient, or an overdose patient, or a withdrawal patient. Confused people. Overweight people. Husbands who refuse to leave because they can't be apart from their spouse.

There is always music running through my brain. Usually the last song I heard before I get out of my car. Sometimes a random song. A song played on a commercial in a room.

I had my zune on shuffle. A song pulled up... one I haven't listened to a lot. I got it to put on a playlist for my BIL.


I had visions, I was in them,
I was looking into the mirror
To see a little bit clearer
The rottenness and evil in me


it gets put on pause. the earbud comes out of my ear and I go tell the OD patient she can't have more morphine.

I'm not sick, but I'm not well
and I'm so hot 'cause I'm in hell


I have had a lot more BHAC patients lately. Manic. Depressed. They take patience.One lady sat at my desk for so long I finally walked her to her room and went and charted on the other side of the unit.

Put me in the hospital for nerves
And then they had to commit me
You told them all I was crazy
They cut off my legs now I'm an amputee,

Lots of middle age women stressed about life going through menopause have chest pain. stereotypical? I have repeatedly stated that I will drop dead of a MI before coming into the hospital with CP. Not a good attitude to have, but the world does not know how to handle stress.

I'm not sick, but I'm not well
And I'm so hot cause I'm in hell
I'm not sick, but I'm not well
And it's a sin, to live so well

People try to numb the pain. A fully functioning adult whose business went bust started drinking. A spouse being divorced swallows a bottle of pills. Cutting. Overeating. I see it all. They don't want to think, they want to feel good...

I wanna publish 'zines
And rage against machines
I wanna pierce my tongue
It doesn't hurt, it feels fine
The trivial sublime
I'd like to turn off time
And kill my mind
You kill my mind
Mind...

I might possibly have gotten cynical in my long nursing career of 18 months

Paranoia, paranoia
Everybody's comin' to get me
Just say you never met me
I'm runnin' underground with the moles
Diggin' holes
Hear the voices in my head
I swear to God it sounds like they're snoring
But if you're bored then you're boring
The agony and the irony, they're killing me, whoa!


So I hear pieces of this song as I come and go, and in the morning as I hang out with some of the night nurses waiting for days to finish report, I hear myself singing

I'm not sick, but I'm not well
And I'm so hot cause I'm in hell
I'm not sick, but I'm not well
And it's a sin to live this well

It fits so well. And yet it is so wrong, all at the same time.

I think I need to start listening to some new music at work.

Flagpole Sitta By Harvey Danger
Edited some due to the whole my mom reads this blog thing.
Video Here

Green is Good.

It is the day after valentines day, and the blog is now green.

Except the header, because I forgot how to change it and my brain is dead.

so we have a green blog and a red header. But not Christmas colors, so it is good.

I love st. patricks day.

probably because it is my day.

Last night I had an OD pt with a 1:1 sitter. Who fell asleep. So hard that I was shaking her shoulder calling her name before she woke up. A couple of minutes later the patient started vomiting... almost aspirated. I don't think the lady would have woken up with the vomiting if I hadn't woke her up first. So I told my charge nurse, who told the house supervisor, who went and talked to the sitter. Who proceeded to ignore me the rest of the night. I don't feel bad, but I would have rather they talk to her after I was done working with her.

I woke up to go to a meeting early yesterday.

Going to bed early does not make getting up early easier. Just saying

The meeting was supposed to last for an hour. I finally left after an hour and 45 minutes because I had to get ready for work. I need to stop agreeing to go to so many meetings.

I am getting the feeling I should stop typing and start sleeping now.

Good night.

Work!

So this blog is primarily about my work, so when the You Capture challenge was to take pictures of work, I smiled. 

My shoes.  Sketchers, because they are my favorites.   Sitting on the tile of my entryway, because they are not allowed to touch my carpet.  Why, you ask?  Well, because of this.  and this.  and because of the patient who broke their IV tubing and came out the hallway flinging blood everywhere.  “hey, look, it’s bleeding”.  There is still a spot of that blood on the white part of my shoe(explain to me how I can have 90% blue shoes but the blood always hits the white?).  I use 4 bleach wipes every morning before I come home, and they still don’t.touch.the.carpet.

This is my work bag.  It holds my clipboard, a collection of important pieces of information that get stuck in my mailbox at work, some magazines, a book or two, my zune, some medical supplies that I can’t get at night so I just carry around with me… the list goes on.  It is bright and colorful, because I love color and hospitals don’t have much.  It also stays on the tile of my entryway and doesn’t come into my apartment.  Why?  because it spends it’s nights on the carpet at work.  That’s why.

My purple bottle… no danger of someone else drinking my water. or me drinking someone else’s water.  my pill crusher… I got tired of never being able to find one, so I bought my own.  My collection of pens.  I am somewhat in love with collecting pens, especially good heavy ones.  I get most of them from my dad.  I sit at his desk at work and steal the ones I like.  Similar to how I pick all the quarters off of his dresser whenever I go home… he doesn’t have to pay for laundry. (yes, I know.  I am spoiled.)

My hospital has a uniform of white tops with navy pants.  I hate it.  Walking into a uniform store and only being allowed to buy plain white scrub tops is like walking in a baskin robbins with 31 flavors and being told you have to have vanilla.  in a cup.  Me, I am more of a double scoop mint chocolate chip and reeses pb cup in a chocolate covered waffle cone sort of girl. I don’t like white.  (and that doesn’t even touch on the logic of making people who spend all day cleaning up body fluids wear white.)

That is why the shirts I wear under my white scrub tops look like this:

I like color.  (especially green, considering the fact that 4/7 are predominately green.)

(and that is the end of my ridiculously long post…)

Bus Ride

I'm not sure if I have mentioned this to ya'll before but I come from a family who is waist deep in Emergency Medicine. My dad helped found the rescue squad in his hometown and he has been an EMT, ED RN, Flight Nurse, and ED Director, among others. My older sister has been an EMT for 5 years and is currently a Paramedic. I always enjoy hearing my dad and sister talk about life on the street and the excitement of being in an ambulance and secretly I have always been a little jealous. Well, Monday I got to ride in a ambulance during an emergency transport of my patient to the closest hospital with a neurosurgeon!

It started with a call from an ambulance crew stating they were brining in a patient with a severe headache and left sided weakness that had started 30 minutes ago. The patient was a gentleman in his 60s who was visiting from up north with no prior health problems except an enlarged prostate. After he arrived we started to work him up and we saw that he was experiencing decerebrate posturing only on his left side, meaning his left arm and leg were involuntarily spasming and rigid. His pupils were unequal and sluggish and he was lethargic but oriented.

We scurried around to initiate the Brain Attack protocol and soon enough I was accompanying him over to ct scan. I am no ct tech but even I could see the bleed in his brain as the images from the scan scrolled across the screen. After I rolled him back to the resus room, I had to start him on a drip to keep his blood pressure below 120 mmHg systolic. The secretary quickly made arrangements and the patient soon had an accepting physician at the nearest hospital with a neurosurgeon. The ambulance crew soon rolled in and as I gave the lead medic report he stopped me and said that he would need a nurse rider because the blood pressure drip the patient was on wasn't in their protocols so he wasn't allowed to titrate it.

I was excited because I've been looking forward to my first ride-along and this was the perfect patient because he was relatively stable, I just needed to keep an eye on his pressure and adjust the drip as necessary to keep it down. Plus I knew the ambulance crew better than most so I was comfortable with them.

They loaded the patient up and I hopped in. We drove all the way to the hospital lights and sirens and I was surprised how bumpy it was in the back of the ambulance. I don't know what I was expecting but definitely not such a fast and crazy ride. The patient remained stable for the duration of the transfer and I only had to adjust his meds a few times. The ride over went super quick and we arrived before I knew it. I gave report to the nurse, transferred the patient over and headed home.

I felt like a grown up nurse, doing my first transfer. I cannot wait until I get to do another because then I won't be as nervous and I'll know what to expect the second time around. It gave me taste of life on the streets and I got to see why the unpredictability and excitement of bus life is so enticing. Someday, I think I would like to be a flight nurse. I haven't made it a definite goal for my future but I am keeping it on the back burner. We shall see...

a post of randomness.

1. 2 Things my patients learned this week that I could have told them ahead of time...
* a gallon of alcohol for a week straight is a bad idea.
* urinals work better when you take the lid off... otherwise the urine
goes flying. possibly hitting the nurse.

2. I was catching up on my ana-recommended news articles this morning (okay... afternoon. I don't do mornings) and I found a couple that were interesting.
* Huntington Hospital upgrades nurses' communications
how awesome would it be to have the hospital give you an ipod touch? I can't
tell if every nurse just gets one or it you pick them up when you get to work,
but still. Something I can pretty much guarantee my hospital will never do.
*For Heart Health, Focus on Risk Factors
At first I thought this would be one of those articles I would make fun of (like
the one I read last week that said something to the effect of NEWS!! WE HAVE
DISCOVERED THAT OBESITY INCREASES HEART RISK!! because I totally didn't know
that!!) but this one was actually interesting. we have been putting more and
more patients on statins, even when their cholesterol is normal, because it has
been proved to have protective qualities in addition to lowering lipids. I wish
I could find a good patient-friendly article to hand out to patients regarding
this, because it is a lot of the younger patients who come in (by young I mean
40-50yo)that we do this for, and they want to know why, and the patient drug
information we print and give still focuses mainly on cholesterol levels.
Decreasing overall heart risk is a good thing, and sometimes a simple medication
is good thing. (however, as the article says, if the only thing wrong is high
cholesterol and your overall risk is low, then don't look to medications to
change it. Work on diet and exercise first. People want easy answers, even if
they aren't the best long term solutions. (I wish I could find the article I
read a couple of months ago about this subject... hence the blogging about this
one, keep it easy to find.)

And in honor of it being wear red for women's heart health awareness day here are a couple of articles on warning signs and symptoms for heart attacks in women. Notice that chest pain is usually last on the list, if it even makes the list. Also notice that heart disease is the number one killer of women, and it gets one day of red as opposed to breast cancer which gets an entire month of pink. Also notice that the risk for heart attacks is highest in the years leading up to and away from menopause, because of the hormonal changes.
hidden signs in women
Women's heart health (good website with lots of info...)


So, in conclusion... if you are a woman age 40-60 you have increased risk, chest pain doesn't always happen and is often the last symptom, and extreme fatigue and flu-like symptoms are often the first. Know your risks, know your body... stay alive. i tell my patients all the time that my number one goal is for them to keep breathing and their heart to stay beating.

That being said I am now going to get off the couch and go hit the gym.

You Capture: Faces

the You Capture Challenge this week is faces.

Meet the Thiessen Girls. Last week my Aunt Ann was in town to see the family, and I managed to be home at the same time. My mom wanted a good picture of the three sisters, so I took my camera over to the grandparents.

In order of age:
Isn't my mom beautiful? This picture was actually taken at Dad's office right before we headed over to the Hillcrest.

Aunt Chris: this is her "I don't want my picture taken but corrie isn't listening to me" face. Classic Chrissy..


The baby of the family (I do so love being the baby of the family. She is also very good at the role...)

Sisters:


I love my family.

and just for kicks... this is the little boy my SIL Karina babysits. He was almost as hard to get a good picture of as Hurley, because he also doesn't hold still. But this face is adorable...