Please sir, I want some more....

For the second time this year I have had the privilege of a phone call from work saying "hey... your (first was the husband, this time grandmother) is in the trauma room." She is 76, still driving and managed to hit another car head on in the rain. The other folks are ok; she spent the weekend in Trauma ICU and is now terrorizing the nurses on the floor. The upside (again) is that I know all of the trauma docs very well and they have kept me well updated.


I'm a firm believer that god doesn't put anything on your plate that you can't handle, but damn this has been a full plate this year.

I picked up a day shift yesterday. Let me just say... the HELL with that! Even with the staff, who were mostly evening shift doing overtime, it sucked ass! Too many people in too small a space. Too much drama and not enough common sense. People keep telling me that I will give up on night shift someday.... I highly doubt it. I truly don't think that I need 20 people in the room to work a post-cardiac arrest. Give me 2 strong nurses, a medic, a really good resident and an attending and I think we can take on the damn world. I couldn't even get to the monitor yesterday for all the people!

Let me also say that the flu is out in full force around here. So much so that all of the triage nurses are now to classify anyone coming in with flu symptoms as "ILI" in the chief complaint box. ILI= influenza like illness. This way our total visits can be tracked. Unfortunately, unless you are sick as dogshit we aren't going to do much for you.

Ugh.... I think I need a vacation.