Singing off key

2005-04-09 - 1:36 p.m.

I've been working evening shifts for the past week. I really like the people who work evening shifts, but I'm such a morning person that I really do have difficulty with the schedule. It takes me three or four days to get myself adjusted and even then I still feel off. And now today, Saturday, they threw in a morning shift before I go back to evening shifts next week! Argh! So I wasn't even feeling sleepy until midnight last night and even then I couldn't fall asleep for several hours. The result was that at five o'clock this morning when my alarm went off I hadn't gotten much sleep. And then I overdid it a bit with the caffeine. Whooee, I was practically bouncing off the walls this morning at work. I had to work hard to keep my butt in the chair and luckily there was enough work to do (it can be slow on the weekends) that I could work like a crazy lady without running out of stuff to do. I'm on my lunch break now.

Tonight I'm going to go see the singer perform. It will be the first time I've seen him since last December. I don't know, I'm excited and scared. I have a feeling I'm headed for a heartache, or trouble, or disappointment. I really don't know what to expect, but I can't really see this ending particularly well. Hopefully it will just be pleasant and nothing more. But I don't know.

So I already had a code this morning at work. I've been supposed to attend them all for the past two weeks, but I think during the past week there was only one other one. That one was during the evening, obviously, so I was the only one to go. Which meant that I was pulling meds and scribing. Yeah, I sucked at it. Luckily, this code wasn't too serious. It was pretty much just a narcotic overdose. We're supposed to draw up all meds into syringes, but I just handed the nurse the vial of naloxone and he drew it up himself. It didn't occur to me until I saw him drawing it up that I should've done it. And my scribing sucked too. It's so not easy! Mostly just because everything was pretty unorganized so it was hard to tell what exactly was going on. I know I will get better, though. I know this is something I can do. Today's code was basically nothing. The patient was no-code except meds. Basically he was already dead when I got there and they called it just a few minutes after I arrived. I really don't have too many issues with people dying. I mean it happens. Quite a bit actually. Especially where I work. What I have trouble dealing with is watching his wife standing outside the room watching her husband die. It's so tough.

Ok, lunch break's over, gotta run!