Ugh, the terrible week continues. Jeremy was gone on business on Monday and got home late Tuesday night. I got into a fender bender (I was at fault) on the way to work at the hospital’s employee shuttle lot at 6:25 am on Wed morning (I’m ran into another nurse’s brand new 2019 Lexus – she stepped out of the car and recognized me and threw up her hands and said – girl! you knew I had the light! and then we parked our cars, hopped on the shuttle and started exchanging texts about insurance. I didn’t even get to see the damage on our trusty Civic in daylight until today (Friday)). Thank goodness Wed at work was manageable in terms of the load. On Thursday, Valentine’s Day, I found myself crying at least twice during the day in the employee restroom. It got so bad that I told my charge nurse that I was going to go cry in the restroom and she looked at me and said – you go ahead and do that for a few minutes. And then, later in the afternoon, my coworkers were following me around and said – tell me what I can do to help and I’d say, ah nothing, it’s nothing and then they said – I won’t stop following you around until you tell me how I can help (I found out later that my charge nurse had deployed them to help me out). It’s not that the patients were so bad or so sick or anything, it’s just the amount of work that needed to be done on each person. And then once I start to lose it, it just continues downhill. My only conclusion from the day is that I’m not doing something efficiently and what I need to cut out is to keep lowering the amount of time that I’m actually nice to a person. This is not what I want to do. Of course, there are the more difficult patients and the easier patients but I take pride in getting along with everyone, in making people feel like I’m happy to see them. And I am happy to see them, unless I’m in the bathroom crying. I love my patients: the old people without their marbles and want to climb out of bed every 3 seconds, the young people with terrible diagnosis, the trans people, the paralyzed people, the cranky people, the ten thousand people with ten thousand diabetic foot ulcers, the HIV/Hep C/TB positive people, the homeless people with computer science degrees, the family members who sneak in food, the snooty family members from Manhattan, the people with stage four pressure ulcers, the patients who can tell I’m having a bad day and try to lower the amount they are asking from me, haha – I think I’m pretty emotionally sensitive, but some patients are better at it than I am. I remember one patient I had for two days and the 2nd day it was just slightly busier than the first day and as soon as I walked into her room on the 2nd day – she took one look at me and said – you are stressed today and you weren’t yesterday. I was like – how can you possibly tell? No one else can tell. And she said – nah, it’s easy to tell and I can tell it from how you walked into the room.
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I came home late on Valentine’s Day and Jeremy gave me a cookie. Thank goodness.
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Would you rather have HIV or Type 2 diabetes? I was reading a reddit thing about this and surprisingly most of the doctors on the forum would rather have HIV. Jeremy said he’d rather have HIV. It’s one pill everyday for HIV for a normal life expectancy with few complications. For Type 2 diabetes, you have a lifetime of monitoring what you eat, glucose monitoring & insulin injections and all the complications that come from uncontrolled sugars: kidney function, blindness, neuropathy, foot issues. I’m hoping I never have either.