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)

My Love For Foamy Soap

I could handle most of it. I was okay with the smell. It had the classic hospital smell of sick people. What it didn't have was the disinfecting smell that covered the sick people smell... you know, the bleach, industrial smell that covers everything else. All I could smell was sick people. I handled the lack of masks for the tb patients. Here, patients with tb go into rooms with reverse air flow and we wear special masks. There, there was big rooms full of sick patients, all in the same ward.

I saw the lack of supplies. They took me into the supply room with the code cart and I wanted to cry. How do you work like this?
We were just there as volunteers, going around and hanging out with patients. Nothing exciting. Lots of bingo. All of the patients that were physically able seemed to be selling items, necklaces bracelets, that sort of thing to send money home. Completely foreign, but we played bingo on home made cards and smiled.

The one think I couldn't handle was the lack of soap. SOAP. There was none. (okay... noto none. One bathroom had one bar of soap.) We were in a 4 story AIDS HOSPITAL where most of the patients had TB and there was no soap. I spent an entire class my first semester of nursing school learning how to properly wash hands, and now I was in a place that had one bar of soap for an entire hospital. (someday I will tell you my opinion of bar soap, but at that point it was all we had.) We went in and out of rooms. We took care of patients. We touched and smelled and played and then we went home and took the longest shower we could. The next week we went to another hospital, where it was more of the same. Big hospital, lots of people, no soap. No gloves, either. Thank goodness for the antibacterial hand wash. But still, sometimes soap is just needed.



the day after we got back from South Africa my friend Rachael got this weird allergic reaction where her face swelled up all the way. I ended up going with her to the hospital a couple of blocks away from our hotel, where mom and dad were going to meet us. (note to self- want to get in to see a doctor fast? tell them you just got back from Africa.) I walked back with her to the ED and it was AMAZING! It was bright! And clean! and it had that disinfectant smell I never before liked! Then I saw it... SOAP!!! I made a very loud noise and went RACHAEL!! THERE IS SOAP!!! Of course, right as I said that the nurse walked in and looked at me like I was nuts, but I didn't really notice... too busy washing my hands. That is the day I fell in love with foamy soap. I never feel as clean as I do if the soap foams. A couple of months ago I discovered foaming soap from bath and body works, and life will never be the same. Not only does if FOAM, but is SMELLS amazing. Heavenly.
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Last night at work I was muttering about the new soap dispensers we have. They get stuck all the time and you have to work to make them pump, but then out comes the foamy soap that kills all manner of bad stuff, and life is good. I don't know how the hospitals in that part of the world that I love are doing, but I hope they found a way to buy some soap. Someday I will make it back over there... and when I go I will take some with me.