Graduation & update.

Our neighbor made this very nice celebratory sign for Vince’s graduation.

We made him pose in his regalia. His school graduation is zooming on Friday afternoon. Is he supposed to sit on the couch with us in his cap and gown? I guess so.

Edda is doing much better. The teeth look mostly good. I think she’s learning to chew with the teeth in the new position.

I have had the worst run of hospital shifts the past week. I can’t believe that I’m saying this after my month-long stint on the COVID units. COVID patients (at least the non-ICU ones) who are pretty stable are actually pretty easy to deal with technically as a nurse. You give them some pills at 9am and then keep them on O2 all day. Some days you turn down the O2 a liter at a time and check if they can come off oxygen. Sometimes they can be weaned, other times, you’re like nope! You gotta stay at 4L. All the non-covid patients who are showing up to the hospital now have either 1) a ton of stuff that is medically going on with them and have had chronic, intractable problems for a long time and require a lot of care or 2) are very, very, very emotionally needy and probably haven’t seen or talked to another person for a sustained period over the past two months. I have spent 36 hours of my last week basically being berated and yelled at while trying to be calm and reassuring. It is not easy. By the end of my last shift, I was so worn down. I got fired by a patient on Tuesday. This has only happened once before when I was just off of orientation. While my unit is a medical/surgical floor, we are low on surgical patients (who usually follow a predictable course of treatment in the hospital) and heavy on medical patients (who are complicated and we course correct throughout the day which means that I need to hunt down the doctor more and change what I’m doing, etc.) I pray all the time that some lab result comes back normal so then I’m like – thank god, I don’t have to fix that. I don’t have to give a transfusion or replete their potassium or order EKGs or send them down to CT. I can just take a moment to close my eyes and breathe.

One thought on “Graduation & update.”

  1. Will there be Vince grad announcements going out? Hope it gets better at the hospital. I’d never fire you. More like “can I have that gal Doris?!”

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