Archive for October, 2007

I was wondering why we don’t have too many of these. It seems like we have bloggers for every area of nursing except pediatrics.

I used to really enjoy reading what PaedsRN has to say. Does anyone know what happened to him? I used to enjoy his blog very much and I saw that as recently as last Spring he was writing at Cricoid Pressure, but that site hasn’t been updated since March.

At any rate, if you’re out there, PaedsRN, please give us a shout, and let us know what you’ve been up to.

In the past 3 months, 13 nurses have been fired from UCI Medical Center. The allegations are that some have been fired for reporting med errors that didn’t actually affect any patients. Nurse Lilliam Triana was suspended for a day without pay when she began to investigate the firings. One theory is that the hospital is trying to clean house to make up for their recent scandals which include problems with the transplant and infertility programs. But if that were true, why would it make sense to fire the nurses?

Here’s a press release from the California Nurses Association and here’s the LA Times story.

This is all very strange. Not only has UCI been designated a magnet hospital, they’ve also been recognized as a number one hospital in Southern California by an ADVANCE for Nurses Readers Choice Survey. But 13 nurses in 3 months is a very high number. It would be great if there were some UCI nurses out there that could comment on this. There has to be more to this story.

If this were the nurse giving out flu shots in my hospital I would definitely go running in the other direction. Quickly. Actually, I am the nurse giving flu shots this year, and many look at me as if I were an evil Zombie Nurse, arriving to inject deadly poison into their deltoid, against their will.

I have to say it’s not a bad gig at all. I show up at 7 AM and report to the Shift Coordinator. Then I grab my bag of supplies and make my way around the hospital. I start with the ER since they supposedly are slow at 7 AM. Then I make my rounds to each and every unit. The first thing I do is find the charge nurse and let her know what I am doing. Then I ask the unit clerk to make an announcement, “Nurse Beth is in the break room giving out flu shots!” The reactions I get are funny. Some people avoid me like the plague. Some people give me dirty looks. On the other hand, some people march right up to me and start rolling up their sleeve to expose their deltoid, and say “Oh great - I need one!” Some people say, “Thank you so much for doing this!” (And then I wonder if they realize that I’m actually getting paid for this.)

You have to admit, it is kind of convenient. Door to door flu shots.

I do get a little tired of the “Oh no - the flu shot makes me sick!” I don’t force the issue too much, though, because I understand where they are coming from. I got mine on Saturday morning and by Saturday afternoon I was feeling a bit achy and flu-ish, if you will, but that went away after a good night’s sleep. The Shift Coordinator would like me to be a lot more aggressive. If she had her way I would be grabbing people and holding them down, kicking and screaming, injecting them whether they like it or not. My style is more like, I’ll tell you the facts and you can make up your own mind. The CDC has a page called, “Key Facts About Seasonal Flu Vaccine,” if you are interested.

Zombie Nurse Hetti appears courtesy of Nattystuff’s shop at Etsy.com. She would make a nice Halloween present, wouldn’t she?

Baby vs. Pomeranian in a Bumbo showdown. This baby is definitely headed to the Bumbo X Games, if we ever hear from her again. Prepare to be extremely amused.

Okay. I really can’t stop thinking about this Bumbo recall. I’m not saying that I’ve tried ALL of these but I’m pretty sure that most of them are pretty inadvisable:

1. Do not strap it to the top of your car and use it as an open air car seat.

2. Do not strap it to your dogs back so baby can go dog-back riding.

3. Do not place Bumbo on top of your TV while the Philadelphia Eagles are playing.

4. Do not place Bumbo on rooftop while stargazing.

5. Do not buy two Bumbos and strap them to your feet to use as snow shoes.

6. Do not strap Bumbo to the back of your bike and or motorcyle.

7. Do not attach strings to your Bumbo and suspend it from your ceiling to use as a swing.

8. Do not use Bumbo as a flotation device.

9. Do not strap the Bumbo to your back to double as a Snugli.

10. And finally, please, no matter how hard this one is to resist, do not ever ever ever attach roller-skates to the bottom of your Bumbo and enter your baby in the Bumbo X Games (coming soon on ESPN5).

I’m not saying I tried #10. Really. Okay, so maybe I thought about it. Does that make me a bad mom? Ben really is very courageous for a baby. I mean look at this kid. He is sitting on a tabletop, in a Bumbo, and doesn’t have a care in the world:

It seems like you hear about toy recalls every week now. Being a new mother I knew it was only a matter of time before one affected me. Here is Baby Ben last summer in his dangerous Bumbo Baby Seat, which has just been recalled:

Apparently the Bumbo Seats are only dangerous if you use them on a table, countertop, chair or other elevated surface, and if you contact the Bumbo company they will send you a warning sticker to put on the Bumbo. I bought mine last summer and here is the warning that was printed on it:

The problem is that the warning is only 4cm by 8cm and I honestly didn’t even pay attention to it until a month or two after I bought the thing.

I always had a bad feeing about this Bumbo Seat. When I first bought it I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, because I could finally put Ben in a position other than lying down. But it was way too tempting to put him on a raised surface. I used to put him on my kitchen counter top while I made dinner or washed the dishes. I also used to feed Ben in his Bumbo before he was big enough to fit into a highchair, but then he got to the point where he could just roll right out of the thing so I stopped using it. At any rate, I’m glad that Ben has not suffered any skull injuries from the precarious Bumbo. Next time, however, I think I’ll trust my instincts.

UPDATE:

(Okay, now I am reading Bumbo posts from all over the Internet, with people saying, “How could anyone be so STUPID as to put the Bumbo on a KITCHEN COUNTER.” Hi, that’s me. I’m that stupid. I might have to go undercover for a few days to hide from child protective services. I’ll keep you posted. I’m sure glad I didn’t say anything about the time I left the Bumbo on top of my car and drove away with Ben on top, or the time that Bill was cleaning out the rain gutters and we let Ben watch from high atop the roof sitting on his Bumbo. And I definitely want to keep it under wraps that I strapped the Bumbo to my dog and let Ben ride on the back. Shhh, don’t tell anyone!)

Ever since Baby Ben was born I’ve only worked about 4 shifts of actual nursing. That’s a little more than half a shift per month.

That’s not what I had planned on. I was hoping to work part-time after Ben was born, but two weeks after he was born, along came NursingLink and offered me the Job of a Lifetime. Three months later I realized that it was not the right opportunity for that particular moment in my life and so I quit. I continued to pick up shifts in the MICU but realized that (a) I need more shifts than they can offer and (b) I need more money. So I signed up for GHOAT’s internal agency. I thought this would be the answer to all of my financial problems and so far it has proved financially fruitful. The problem is that I’ve found myself in Nurse Limbo.

What is Nurse Limbo? Well here is the description of the job that I originally answered:

“The Outpatient Building is looking for 2 ACLS nurses to be on their Emergency Response team, Monday - Friday from 4pm-8pm. Start date: 9/17, end date is 12/31/07″

Doesn’t sounds kind of exciting, right? “ACLS,” “emergency response team” and the hours are such that I could receive ICU pay without having to hire a babysitter. AND it has a start date and an end date, so if it wasn’t quite what I was looking for, I could move on after it was over.

Well it’s not what I thought it would be, not at all. Here’ s the problem: The team must have a doc on it and they can’t seem to find an MD who would be willing to do it. So in the meantime the nurse administrator has recruited me to work on some projects for her, for the same hours and the same pay.

The first week wasn’t to bad. I had to compile some data and produce some charts in Excel, illustrating how far we had come in reaching some of the National Patient Safety Goals

Excel is not my strong suit but I’ve always been interested in the visual presentation of information and so I didn’t mind this task (okay that’s kind of a stretch - this job kind of has the Purina Cat Chow factor but hey, it’s temporary, right?)

The next week I was asked to go to some of the departments and ask them for completed surveys. Again not too bad. I don’t mind walking around the hospital. I don’t mind meeting new people. I don’t even mind getting yelled out by people (”What? She wants us to fill out more surveys?”) I don’t mind because I feel their pain. It wasn’t too long ago that I was working as a clinician and would curse anyone that came by asking me to fill out a survey.

But now it’s week three and I’ve been sitting in front of spreadsheets and graphs all week and I’m not sure how much more of this I can take. I could always go back to the agency and ask for a new assignment. The problem is that I don’t have any flexibility with respect to childcare. And I think the key to making money in per diem agency nursing is to have that flexibility.

I think the next step here might be going back to working on a unit part-time, even if it means taking a pay cut. I was hoping to avoid this at least until Christmas (I will not work on Ben’s first Christmas!) but this may come sooner rather than later.

The ironic thing? Every single day I get emails requesting per diem nurses for the SICU, but the SICU nurse manager refuses to take me because I only have MICU experience. Her loss, I guess. I’ve had post-surgical patients in the MICU (lung reductions, ex laps, etc.) and I know what to do with a freakin’ JP drain. Not to mention the fact that we take care of patients with non-surgical wounds all the time (can you say Stage 4 pressure ulcers?) and I can rock a dressing change like nobody’s business.

At any rate, I predict a change in my situation sooner rather than later. I miss being a clinician.

Move to San Francisco and you can supervise people shooting up drugs…

City health officials took steps Thursday toward opening the nation’s first legal safe-injection room, where addicts could shoot up heroin, cocaine and other drugs under the supervision of nurses.

The other day I was looking for baby stuff on Craig’s List. I found a high chair and an activity center for $10 each. Too good to be true, I thought, but I had to check it out. I called the seller and asked for directions to her house, and headed out to see her stuff.

The seller greeted me at her door and she had a big black eye. It looked like the kind of bruising you would get if someone decked you. She showed me her stuff and it was evident she had once had a daycare center at the location. She explained to me that she had to close it because of “family problems,” and gave me this look that said, “Family problems equaling a black eye.”

At this point I felt so sorry for her but also extremely awkward. The stuff she was trying to sell was broken and filthy. I politely thanked her and left without buying anything. As I pulled away a friend of hers had driven up to the house, got out of the car and gave her a hug, so at least I didn’t feel like I was leaving her completely alone.

I questioned myself on the way home: Should I have tried to get help for her? Do I have any compassion at all? Am I really cut out to be a nurse? I’m not really sure what I could have done, anyway. I was carrying Baby Ben the whole time and my strongest instinct was to get him the hell away from this place cause it definitely had some bad joo joo.

I’ll be some of you ER nurses would have known what to do…