A post in 2 parts today! Firstly, I wanted to direct your undivided attention to this week’s Grand Rounds at Intueri. Maria has clearly spent hours in the kitchen whipping us up some yummy medical treats.

Nextly, Alwin weighed in on a pet peeve of his. I can’t say that I’ve ever personally been in this situation. Maybe Al does “look like Maverick in Top Gun, ready to perform the medical equivalent of an unauthorized control tower flyby every time I move to the bedside.” ‘Course, I haven’t been doing this for over 20 years. His post contains a little quote which fits critical care nursing to a T: “Nothing is so quickly or thoroughly punished in any work environment as competence.” More on that in some other post.

My personal irritation at work is family phone calls. Not the usual one or two per shift that I get: a husband, wife, or son/daughter calling to ask about my patient. Their loved one. They certainly should have access to updates about the patient’s status. And like Al, I love to educate patients and families about the nuances of whatever disease that has befallen them.

No, I’m talking about the patient that has a wife and 4 grown children. This one particular patient I had was really quite very stable and even had transfer orders. Unfortunately, his destination had no beds and he stayed with us until the evening. Well, I say “unfortunately,” but he really was a nice guy with a good sense of humor. I enjoyed having him as a patient.

After the first hour of my shift, that is.

Besides him, I was also assigned to a critically ill patient requiring a good measure of my attention. I quickly assessed my stable patient, and then went to my unstable patient, because he would take the most time to assess and straighten out. In the first hour that I was there, I received no less than FOUR (4) phone calls from Stable Patient’s grown children. One from each! In an hour!! First damn thing in the morning!!

Each time one of them called, I was taken away from the bedside of my other patient to go and tend to them. I was happy to take the first phone call, annoyed by the second phone call, irritated with the 3rd, and downright pissed at the fourth. By the third call, I told the caller that I had already received two calls that morning and it was getting difficult to get things done. To which she replied, “Well, if my father has a direct line, I’d be glad to call it instead.” No lady, there aren’t direct lines in this ICU. Are there direct lines in ANY ICU??

I’m assuming that each caller was not aware of the other callers, because the fourth one came a few minutes after the third. It’s still annoying. The Stable Patient was sitting up eating breakfast and reading the paper. I’ve gotten less calls from family members of patients who were knocking on death’s door. In almost every case, they didn’t want to talk to me, they wanted to talk to their father. So I would just have to “park” them and then transfer the call into his room. (This does not mean that I parked them and then dialed a few more numbers. This means that I had to park them and then physically walk into my other patient’s room and punch in the code I had parked it with.) There are no direct lines into patient’s rooms; we take phones in for patients that can talk to people, and take them out when those patients leave.

Just add “switchboard operator” to my long list of responsibilities as a nurse.

My advice to anyone reading this: No matter what unit your loved one is in, pick ONE PERSON to make a phone call and then have that person update the rest of the family. I found myself giving the exact same update to four people. Most nurses would have told the 2nd caller to call up the first, but I kept thinking that “this will be the last one.”