Archive for July, 2008

Testing out the Wordpress iPhone app. They raised the parking rate to $11 a day. : (

Just watched Hopkins, episode 4 and let me tell you, there is not a dry eye in the house. That little Peyton reminded me of my Ben. I’ve always felt that it takes very special people to work in pediatrics, and I’m sure I’m not one of them. I don’t believe I could hold my shit together, not for a second, if I were confronted with a 2 year old, cardiac arresting. I wish I knew some pediatric bloggers - I would go over to their blogs right now and say “THANK YOU FOR BEING SO SPECIAL.” in the comments. Unfortunately I don’t know any pediatric bloggers. They must be too busy saving lives to bother with blogging.

Ben’s pediatrician did her rotation through Hopkins and the last time Ben had a visit, I got her to talking about it. She told me how she would rotate through the PICU and just cry all the way home, every single night.

On the trivial front, I recognized about half a dozen people in the cardiac cath lab, where little Peyton was getting his heart biopsy. I’ve seen Dr. Ringel passing throught the recovery room many times. Also, when they filmed Dr. Reifsnyder (the vascular surgeon) he was driving through the neigborhood that I used to live in. The condo that he put a down payment on used to be a Knights of Columbus Hall. There’s a lot of that type of gentrification going on in Baltimore.

Did you know that I started working at Hopkins because of its proximity rather than its reputation? In my senior year of nursing I had to choose where to complete my ICU rotation, and I chose Hopkins because it was a ten minute commute. I used to joke that it took longer for me to walk from my car to the unit, that it took me to actually drive to the hospital. Now I live about 30 minutes from Hopkins, but I still would rather not work at any other hospital.

I may be giving up my sweet gig at the Recovery Room. They have told me that they won’t be needing any agency employees anymore. They tried very hard to convince me to come on as staff there, but I just don’t think I could do it. It would effectively cut my hourly rate in half.

Can you imagine cutting your salary in half? How much would you have to love a job to agree to do it for half the price? I’m fond of the Recovery room, it’s true. But I don’t love it that much.

My strategy is to do nothing. If I leave them my phone number, I am sure they will eventually call me and ask me to work. This is is a common theme I’ve noticed in nursing. Every once awhile a nurse manager loves to get up and say, “We are so pleased to announce that we are fully staffed and no longer relying on agency nurses!” only to find that a month later they are trying to fill shifts with (guess what?) Agency nurses. Or traveling nurses. Or warm bodies.

Meanwhile I signed up for some MICU shifts. I hope I don’t regret it. I guess after last week’s excitement, I’m ready for some ICU type action.

No. Nurse Jackie!

Edie Falco is set to play the title role in an up and coming new series on Showtime. Apparently nurse Jackie is a “complicated woman, working in an inner-city hospital.”

My only question is, does it take place in the 1940’s? She looks more like the lunch lady than any actual nurses I’ve seen lately. It’s a cute picture, though. I wonder what Kim would give her on the Emergiblog Cap Rating Scale.

Here’s a diagram of post-procedural patient flow that I made, because that’s just the kind of geeky nurse that I am:

As you can see, I recover radiology patients and cardiology patients.

So what do you call a radiology patient that has an acute MI in my recovery room?

DAMNED LUCKY!!!

I had written a long, finely crafted post to tell you this story, but then I read Phil Baumann’s post on HIPAA and I remembered exactly why I typically do not blog about patient encounters.

So here’s the Cliff Notes version, scrubbed of details:

(imagine the following paragraph being recited by an auctioneer)

“You just had a radiology procedure done and you’re lying in the recovery room after your procedure when OUCH! you’re having chest pain and the 12 lead was done and HEY! the cardiologist happens to be right here and OHHH! there happens to be a clean procedure room so we are going to cath you now and LOOK! there’s a complete blockage of one of your coronary arteries and you could have died but we just stented it and now you’re stable so it’s off to the CCU don’t let the door hit your behind on the way out. ADIOS. And don’t forget to tell your family to rub the toe of the Jesus statue.”

Several people came up to me afterward and said, “How does it feel? You saved a life today?” And I said, “I can’t possibly take credit. It was the whole team, and a good bit of karma, all working together.”

I still felt spectacular, though, because I was a part of the team that saved a life.

And that’s why it’s good to be a nurse.

( :

I saw some of my MICU friends at their lunch table the other day. (We nurses are so clannish. The MICU nurses sit at their table and the recovery room nurses sit at their table, and the only way we would sit together is if we were out of tables.)

So I asked them, “Who’s been watching Hopkins, the series?”

The answer? Not a single one of them has been following it.

“So why is that?” I asked.

“Why watch it?” they said. “We live it,” and everyone kind of rolled their eyes at me for asking such a ridiculous question.

I thought I might tweet from work yesterday.

But then two things happened:

1. My email wasn’t working, so I couldn’t upload my pictures to twitpic.

2. I got busy. Really busy.

And then one of my patients had an acute MI, right. in. front. of. me. We saved his life by getting him to the cath lab in about less time than it takes to listen to Bust a Move. So twitter was pretty much out of the question.

Long story short, it was the most amazing day of my life as a nurse. I’ve been trying to avoid telling stories that involve patients, but in this case, I think it is a story that needs to be told, because it reminded me of what I love about nursing. And to be honest with you, I was really starting to forget.

So tomorrow I will tell you the story.

(note: the photo above is of the Jesus statue. At Hopkins there is a awe-inspiring statue of Jesus Christ in the former lobby of the dome building. The tradition is that you rub Jesus’ toe and say a prayer for your loved ones who may be sick. It’s a really cool tradition, and if you look closely at His marble toe, you can see it is lighter in color from so many people rubbing it over the years.)

Both Trauma Queen and ImpactEDnurse are blogging about ICE this week.

Nursing.alltop.com has been launched over the weekend!

For those of you who are unsure about what this alltop thing is all about here’s an excerpt from their About page:

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections - “aggregations” - into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, Muslim, celebrity gossip, military, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the headlines of the latest stories from dozens of sites and blogs.

You can think of an Alltop site as a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet.

I love this concept and it’s exactly what I had in mind when I started working on OrientedX3 in February, 2007. I decided to give my list of feeds to alltop and suggest that they do a nursing one, largely because I thought they could do it better than I could. I get so bogged down with the design and coding issues, and I just don’t have the resources to keep developing it. I am however, going to keep it up and running because I’ve found it to be very useful as far as finding other nurses online who use twitter.

If you find your nursing blog is on alltop, and you want to show your pride, they have a great collection of badges you can use. As you can see, I’m proudly displaying mine!

Many thanks to Phil Baumann for suggesting that I contact Guy Kawasaki (one of the founders of Alltop) and suggest they do a nursing.alltop.com. Phil has a very interesting blog about social media and he happens to be an ICU nurse as well!

I really am enamoured by the title of this book. Have you ever read anything by Elizabeth Berg? The thing that I find very interesting about her is that she was once a Registered Nurse.

Here’s a quote from her website:

Before I became a writer, I was a registered nurse for ten years, and that was my “school” for writing - taking care of patients taught me a lot about human nature, about hope and fear and love and loss and regret and triumph and especially about relationships - all things that I tend to focus on in my work.

I have been inspired many, many times to write stories about the people I have taken care of while nursing. Nurses have such a unique vantage point: we are given a very intimate glimpse into people’s suffering and sometimes joy. It’s no wonder that so many of us feel compelled to express ourselves by blogging.