Quote:
Originally Posted by AreWeThereYet?
My wife used to be an ICU med surg nurse and would've gladly assisted you in hiding that in the nurses break room.
She's cool like that. Her words, not mine!!
She's giggling RN because she remembers patients like you very well and missed that part of her job then!
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A small part of my day job of 35 years involves occasional interactions with nursing students. I can't check into any regional hospital without a "hey, I know you from blah, blah, blah" at least once per day.
When I was up on the normal floors at the big regional medical center, one of the day nurses had a raw clinical nursing student from another school shadowing her. She asked if I would mind being that student's first ever human injection patient. She came back 5-6 times afterward that day, to check if it hurt me. On subsequent clinical days, she would stop by with classmates telling them about how I was her first injection patient and wanting me to tell them that it didn't hurt. (As if an injection on the lower abdomen is going to hit any nerves, and I should know because I had to stab myself there 3-4 times daily with insulin at the time.)
That whole 7-week ordeal started out in the ER at a local hospital. They did not have a free bed upstairs, so I spent three days in the ER waiting to be moved. Since I had a lot of nurses who knew me there, they managed to snag everything (but a door and private bathroom) to make me a private "upstairs room" in the ER...including furniture and guest chairs.
There was one old/gruff ER nurse on the overnight shift who was not too keen on my activities. She yelled at me for going down the hall to use the restroom, insisting that I stay in bed and pee in a bottle (on severe doses of diuretics). On the second night, she came by at the start of her shift and actually verified the IV bag contents and drip rate settings. The nurse before had hung the wrong bag! She quickly discontinued it and started the correct medicine. She was explaining it to me, and I told her that the nurse who did it actually bought in two other nurses and an iPhone calculator trying to punch the correct dosage rate into the IV pump. Long story short, I told her where I worked, and we had a looooong discussion about millennial nurses and why they can't even do basic dosage calculations even with a calculator in hand. After that, my bathroom privileges were restored.
My favorite one from that stay was that they finally found me a private room upstairs, and it was in the middle of a heat wave. I cranked the air conditioning down to morgue-like temperatures. Once word spread, middle-age nurses were stopping in 24/7...to check on me...from floors/wings away! The nurses on my floor/wing were having their shift change meetings in my room, because their nurse station only had fans and was hot. One nurse came in, felt the temperature, and asked me if I had a temperature preference because she thought it was too cold. I responded that she couldn't make it cold enough...and to consider that a challenge and not a criticism of the room's AC system.
I'll have to share the story of the worst day of my life at another time.....