Monday, July 30, 2007

Snake (part II)

I was still pondering the misfortunes of the stupid jarhead when I realized that I had left out another bit if the story. At our hospital we help train Special Operations Combat Medics (SOCM) aka Special Forces. These guys are mostly Army Rangers and Navy Seals with a few Marine Corpsman and Air Force guys thrown in too.

Now don't get me wrong. I am not a fan of the war, but I am a complete supporter of our military. If giving these guys some extra time will help them to survive, or to save another life then I'm all for it. Unfortunately, in their 8 months of medical training, these guys have realized that they must have a complete mastery of all things medical and therefore can tell the nurses what we should and shouldn't be doing. (this is a bit of a generalization, of course.... there are some good ones too) Most of them are hot shot-all knowing pricks that we tolerate for the 2-3 weeks that they are around.

So, back to the snake man. The guys were more than a little excited about this snake bite. When the patient actually got there I had trouble getting to the bedside for all of the SF medics. They put him on the monitor, bp and pulse ox while I did an exam. When they inflated the BP cuff the patient started screaming. Some dumbass put the BP cuff on the side of the bite..... the arm was already swollen to the elbow and excruciatingly painful.

When I asked who did it one guy raised his hand. I told him to go help one of my other patients to x-ray and then he could come back. (essentially kicked him out of the room) I know that I am now on the shit list, but he fucked up and could have seriously injured the patient. I didn't see this kid come back into one of my rooms for the rest of the night. I'm sorry, but I don't back down to these guys..... I don't care if they are Rangers, Seals or Barney the Purple freaking dinosaur!

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi JeepGirl,

I was wondering if you'd be interested in posting any articles from the Nursezone.com website. There are lots of relevant articles for todays nurse. The great news is that using nursezone content on your site is no cost. We'd just like to have a link back to our site for those of your bloggers interested in finding a community of nurses, CE opportunities, travel nursing and other relevant nurse aids. A partial example of a nursing article is below:

Nurse Overcomes Cancer—Twice—to Provide Care to Others


By Nancy Deutsch, RN, contributor

Many people yearn to make nursing their career, but few have to battle the odds like Valerie Bush.

The Independence, Kentucky, woman, who was a medical technician for six years and a nurse’s aide “on and off forever,” waited until her children were raised to return to nursing school. When she finally entered the Gateway Community and Technical College, it was unbelievably stressful. Not only was the single mother dealing with her course work, but her father died, and her youngest daughter was dealing with medical problems, including bipolar disease.

Bush, now 42 years old, was “disgustingly healthy when I started” school in 2004, but quite overweight, and she started to lose a lot of the extra girth.

“I lost massive amounts of weight in just a few months,” she recalled. “I was a pretty big girl. I lost 100 pounds.”

At first, Bush chalked up the weight loss and constant belching to stress, but when she shed all the weight, she found a lump in her breast. “I decided to see a doctor over break.”

Bush was diagnosed with DCIS, and beneath that, metastatic breast cancer.

“I lost everything in a week,” Bush said. The diagnosis sent her daughter off the deep end, upset her boyfriend, and meant she had to stop the classes she had waited so long to take.

“As a nurse, you think you know what a cancer diagnosis entails,” she said. “But you don’t. It affects every single thing in your life.” … (more article to come)


© 2007. AMN Healthcare, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Let me know what you think.

Tracy (nursezoneportal@earthlink.net)

6:10 PM  
Blogger Mad Cabbie said...

My kind of girl JeepGirl! You don't take shit from no one! Forget Nursezone.com, I want you to be my guest blogger!

8:34 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home