the pursuit of knowledge and experiences.

So I don't really like working weekends. On nights weekends consist of Friday Saturday and Sunday. Usually you only work one or two of them. This week I worked all three. Last weekend I work Friday and Saturday. I HATE WEEKENDS. Seriously. I missed church, I missed football, I did nothing.

I did, however, do a whole bunch of things I had never done before. One night I did peritoneal dialysis. I had no clue what I was doing, figured I could fake it and found out soon that it wasn't possible. I ended up having to get a nurse from the renal floor to come help. She treated me like a retard, not knowing how to do it. Of course, later that night I got a transfer from that nurses floor who was like, "I don't really know but I think his heart was regular". Seriously? How hard is it to tell if a heart is beating regularly? Anyway, peritoneal dialysis is an interesting process. You put a bunch of fluid into the stomach cavity, where through the process of osmosis all the toxins in the body float into the fluid, and then we drain it out. How awesome is the human body?

then I got to access a port a cath. Basically that is a port stuck under the skin that you stick a needle into. They are supposed to be changed every week, and this guy had his for over a month. I GOT TO STICK A NEEDLE IN HIS CHEST. How totally cool is that? This isn't some tiny needle, either, it was stinkin huge. and bent. and I shoved it in his chest. Sometimes this job is totally fun.

Not so sure he thought it was fun.

There is always something new to learn, always something I don't know. I like that about my job. In the next month I am going to be taking 5 all day classes to prepare to get my PCCN certification. I am excited for the review, the chance to gain more knowledge. We shall see how it goes.

Carpet.

If there is one thing that should not be in hospitals, at least in the parts that have patients, is carpet. YUCK. Do you know what I get on my shoes on a daily bases? MRSA, CDiff. Blood. Patients leak on the floor on the way to the bathroom. They drop things. Their bandages fall off. NASTINESS gets on floors in hospitals. Up until last year when I first started working, we had carpet in patient rooms,which was gross. Then they got smart and my boss had it all replaced with linoleum. Ugly, but when a patient has a fem pop blow and looses have of her blood in two minutes flat until I can start holding pressure and yelling for help all I have to do is get house-keeping to come mop it up. When the patient starting chasing us in the hallway with a full urinal trying to splash us and then tripped and fell backwards and slammed his head into the floor and started bleeding out of his ear, that blood was still there nine months later thanks to the carpet. There is a limit to now much you can get out of carpet. Especially when it is ten years old and already full of nasty junk.

Nine months being the key word to when the carpet was replaced last week. We were all excited about the new floors, until we figured out that they were putting down more carpet. Yup. My hospital which is perpetually broke spent money to place more carpet down, not something solid that we can mop. want to see what it looks like?
(okay, so apparently I fail at paint and this pic is kind of small but if you click on it it gets bigger)

nice, huh? We are somewhat flabbergasted. The carpet is actually somewhat nice looking. At least it was, until like the second day after it was laid when one of B's patients managed to break his IV tubing, leaving the port open and blood pouring out of his arm. He walked out of his nice, linoleumated floor and onto our brand new carpet to get help. There is now blood all over that section of floor.

Blood that will probably be there for the next 10 years until they get around to replacing it again.

That, my friends, is why I will never like carpet. And why I will never wear work shoes anywhere but work.

(in other news, my dad had an article published in the Wichita Eagle about health care reform. He used some of the info I sent him... exciting. Click here to read it)