One of my colleagues recently died.

When I started at my current hospital, she was my main preceptor.  She was a stickler for getting things done correctly – no shortcuts.  When I would come across a patient or apparatus that I was unfamiliar with, all I wanted was for her to tell me what to do or show me how to operate it, but every time she insisted on having me look it up.

I came to appreciate the wisdom in that.

We worked together for several years.  She eventually went to a different department, I started working per diem, and we didn’t see each other much anymore.  But we’d run into each other here and there over the years.

She was very kind.  She wasn’t the type that was into gossip, but she did always want to know what was going on with you.

I saw her about a week before she died.  Everyone knew her time was short, including her.  Yet when you walked into the room, her face would light up and you’d get the impression that she was thinking, “Ah, just the person I was hoping to see.”  She handled the whole thing so much more gracefully than the rest of us.

I was thinking last night about how she simply isn’t in the world anymore.  And how weird that is.  I feel like we are all connected by invisible strings to the people we know, and when one string is cut, even the thinnest one, it throws you off balance.

I’m feeling a bit off-kilter for sure.

Or the other statements, “I could never do this” and “It takes a special person to be able to do this.”

These words are usually uttered by family members who walk into an ICU room to see me calmly managing a patient on drips and vent, hooked up to monitors and other various tubes and wires.  I’m sure these words are spoken many many times every day all over the world.

I appreciate hearing it, but it always makes me think of the jobs that I could never do. Sure, there are lots of jobs that I’d simply be unhappy doing, but there are a few that I’d almost rather starve than do.

I could never be a dentist or hygienist.  I cannot handle dealing with teeth.  If I see my that my intubated patient has a loose tooth, I’m done for.

I could never be an exterminator.  In fact, I was talking to an exterminator the other day (If you don’t live in California, you are probably not aware that it is, in fact, resting atop a gigantic ant hill).  He was friendly and chatty and I myself mentioned that I don’t know how he was able to do what he does because I literally shiver with disgust at the mere PICTURE of a large bug.  He then asked what I did and I replied that I was a nurse.  He looked at me for a moment and said that the site of blood completely freaks him out.  There’s no way he’d ever work in the medical field.

Within my own profession, I can imagine doing almost any type of nursing.  That isn’t to say that I’d enjoy it or even be good at it.  But there is one branch of nursing that I will never go into.  There is one patient population that I cannot even begin to cope with taking care of, and that is burn patients.  I don’t know how you can cause someone so much pain day in and day out, even if it’s in the name of healing.   Any burn unit nurses out there?  How on earth do you work in such a unit?

What are some jobs that you could never do?

Here’s a very thought-provoking post from edwinleap.com:

So the money is flowing from the taxpayers to the industries in order to keep all of them solvent.  Mind you, we in medicine have asked for some crazy things like: increases in reimbursement for actual work on actual people; tax credits for uncompensated care; limits on malpractice awards.  As a result, Medicare payments fluctuate along with Medicaid.  Care is still free.  Malpractice litigation sails along as smoothly as the Love Boat.

Great post!

This post might be a little weird, but here goes. I was thinking the other day about when you’re concentrating on something in front of you, and you look up for no particular reason and are faced with something dreadful or funny.

For instance, once I was at work charting and heard a mechanical noise next to me. I didn’t really think anything of it (I’m surrounded by machines!) but decided to look up when I heard the noise stop. In ICU rooms, there are monitors mounted to the wall next to the beds. They’re high up, maybe 6 1/2 feet. I’m 5’5″ and I always have to reach way up to adjust alarms, etc. When I looked up, I saw that my patient had found the button that raises the entire bed – all the way up to the monitor. He could have started playing with it if he’d had the inclination. I didn’t realize that the beds could go that high.

Other things I see aren’t so humorous. This just happened the other day and it always makes my stomach drop with dread. I walked into my patient’s room, looking at her medications as I did so, and looked up to see a pool underneath her bed – of liquid poo. When there is so much poo that it actually starts falling off the bed to form a puddle below, things have simply taken a turn for the worse.

It’s always a treat to look up and see your vest-and-wrist-restrained patient hanging upside down over the side rail of their bed. Completely tangled.

This last one didn’t happen to me, but I heard plenty about it. We had a patient who fell at home and broke his neck. The doc decided that he needed Gardner-Wells tongs (scroll down a bit for a picture) until surgery could be done. These are tongs that are secured into the head to provide traction for the cervical spine. I don’t know if they’re screwed into the skull, but suffice it to say that you don’t want those suckers comin’ out.

Can you see where this is going? The night shift nurse looked up and saw her previously flat-on-his-back patient sitting up in bed, tongs off to the side of the bed. The patient stated that they were really bothering him and he felt much better having them off, thank you. He also relayed that it was really difficult to get them off, but it was worth it to be free of them!

No harm done; the patient had his tongs replaced, had surgery later that day and did just fine. Still… what a sight.