It really is a shame that baking as a hobby is deleterious to one’s waistline. It’s so nice to spend an afternoon baking, but then when you are done, you have an enormous delicious cake with no choice but to eat it. I have a slight plan to bake right before I have a shift at the hospital, so I can bring it to the break room and then share it among my many coworkers, but I have to be coordinated for that. And then maybe it’s terrible to offer up extra sweets for anyone, esp since 75% of our patients are diabetic. It’s a bad day when you have to cover four patients with insulin for three meals each. As an excuse, there are actually fewer donuts at work than I thought there would be and I don’t work that often.
I like to spend some mental energy during my shifts trying to come up with the “star patient interaction” of the day. Usually something amusing or interesting somebody says. I had a patient who had just gotten out of surgery. A little woozy, but not too bad. Got up to walk to the bathroom to pee. Was ordering dinner, chatting with their spouse etc. I asked, so from 0 to 10 what’s your pain right now? They looked at me and said when I’m sitting here and not moving, it’s like a 10. But then when I shift in the bed, it’s like way past a 10. I’m said, you know, the scale only goes up to a ten. And they looked at me and sighed and said, yeah, I know. Later, at dinner home with my family, I said I thought a 10 in pain meant that a T-Rex had ripped off your arm. And then Jeremy said, that doesn’t hurt for the first 30 seconds because you are in so much shock. And I agreed. But then I insisted that after the first 30 seconds it would be a 10. And then Jeremy said, well in about 3 minutes you would be dead because you’d be losing blood quickly and the T-rex, presumably, would still be after you so does it even matter that you were experiencing the worst pain imaginable for about 2 minutes? No one is going to rush on over with syringes full of fentanyl or dilaudid to help you out there.
Jeremy’s contribution to my hospital job was to buy a bunch of cheap chargers for my chargerless patients. You’d be surprised how often I get asked, do you have a charger I can borrow to charge my phone? It probably is 2nd only to, do you know when the doctor is coming by? I also get asked to validate parking, but not as often. Really nothing is sadder than a patient alone with a phone that’s out of juice who went to the ED in the morning and thought they’d be in and out, but instead, they were admitted and they had told no one where they were going. No one remembers anyone’s number anymore so they can’t even call their best friends. So Jeremy bought a bunch of cheap-o chargers for me to stash in my locker. Ones that hopefully will get returned to me, but OK if I don’t managed to get back.
