Dear heart

Dear heart,
I met a boy.
Prepare to shatter.

RN

I PASSED!!!
now an RN!!
I LOVE IT!
HIP HIP HOORAY!

...by the way, my birthday was on wednesday and i am now 23. it was a pretty good birthday and it was extra celebration because i passed my boards. life is good right now! i had a great vacation up north in the UP with my family last weekend. we went up to munising and stayed at muskalunge state park. we took the pictured rocks cruise and it was amazingly beautiful! then we basically went two tracking in the four runner and found the mouth of "the two hearted river" and hung around there for a while too. then we went out to tahquamenon falls and played in the waterfalls and hiked around the falls. next we went hunting for moose with no luck (but for my birthday my brother got me a stuffed moose named monty. :) haha). the vacation was awesome. below is a pic of the a lighthouse from the pictured rocks cruise, one of a section of the pictured rocks, one of the fam, and one of tahquamenon.

five hours later

so 265 questions on NCLEX. the longest 5 hours ever. i had NINE select all that apply. that is INSANE! a bunch of peds, oncology, lupus, medications, and prioritizing which client to see first. other than that i havent got a clue about how it went. we will see on wednesday. ill update soon! keep your fingers crossed for me!

you would if you could, if you had another mother

so im sitting in the room of a screaming patient- THE WORST screamer/complainer i have EVER seen. she is here with a UTI and ARF (acute renal failure). she has a history which includes bipolar disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, along with breast CA, COPD, anemia, hypothyroidism, osteomyelitis, GERD, S/P catheter, HoTN and HTN, and memory loss. she is a typical 60 yo train wreck of a woman.

some of the things she has said to me tonight include:
"i have rheuma'tory' arthritis in my legs- help me help me! take this pain away!" -grrr i cant!

"you would help me if you could, if you had another mother!" -what does my mom have to do with anything?

"mother, mother, can i be a pretty princess too?" -i take it she wants to look like me, haha!

not kidding, she just screams and screams and then curses at me and then screams some more. she hits the call button to get other people to rearrange her pillows (every 2 minutes!) because she doesn't like the way i do them. she constantly says i am hurting her even when i am 5 feet away from her and she says that i want to kill her (the thought has crossed my mind i admit but i would never say or do a thing like that- i am a nurse you know). i swear i see multiple personalities emerging as she goes from screaming and cursing at me to all of a sudden all sweet and cute like a child and asking for her teddy bear. i am definitely witnessing delusions and hallucinations from this woman.

here is my problem. she has an order for haldol q1 hour which is good dont get me wrong, but her pain meds are only q4 and she is getting ultram. i have not had any experience before tonight with ultram but at least on this woman it seems to wear off after about 20 minutes and she only gets it every 4 hours!! the other 3.5 hours are spent screaming and begging for more ultram because she is "dying" and"cant stand the pain." it is 5:00 in the morning and i am mad about getting pulled to this other unit anyway let alone have to sit with this horrible patient who by the way is in contact precautions for MRSA which i forgot to mention. i was given the option to go home at 11:00pm and use PTO for the last 8 hours of my shift but i thought i should stay and work- oh boy was i wrong!!!

i try to have patience with this woman, i really do. but seriously, there is only so much patience a person can have and i ran out of mine about 4 hours ago. i will admit that i dont have the largest store of patience in me but even someone with 10 times more patience than me would have run out long before now. i am getting a migraine from all the yelling and screaming. please god just make the next 2 hours go by fast and take my mind to a place of peace right now. im out.

bad day?

and i thought i was having a bad day today. i was looking through old emails and i found this one. it made me laugh and it made me put my bad day a little more in perpective even if some of these things are way out of wack!

1. The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the ExxonValdez spill in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of themost expensively saved animals were released back into the wild amid cheers and applause from onlookers. A minute later, in full view, they were both eaten by a killer whale.

2. A woman came home to find her husband in the kitchen, shaking frantically with what looked like a wire running from his waist towards the electric kettle. Intending to jolt him away from the deadlycurrent she whacked him with a handy plank of wood kept by the back door, breaking his arm in two places. Until that moment, he was happily listening to his Walkman.

3. Two animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn. Suddenly the pigs, all two thousand of them, escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two hapless protesters to death.

4. Iraqi terrorist, Khay Rahnajet, didn't pay enough postage on a letter bomb. It came back with "return to sender" stamped on it.Forgetting it was the bomb, he opened it and was blown to bits.

Your day's not so bad, is it? So, the next time you want to complain, remember .... things could be a lot worse. . . .

5. Fire authorities in California found a corpse in a burned out section of forest while assessing the damage done by a forest fire. The deceased male was dressed in a full wet suit, complete with SCUBA tanks on his back, flippers, and face mask. A post-mortem revealed that the person died not from burns, but from massive internal injuries. Dental records provided a positive identification. Investigators then set about to determine how a fully clad diver ended up in the middle of a forest fire. It was revealed that, on the day of the fire, the person went on a diving trip off the coast some 20 miles away from the forest. The firefighters, seeking to control the fire as quickly as possible, called in a fleet of helicopters with very large dip buckets. Water was dipped from the ocean then flown to the forest fire and emptied. You guessed it. One minute our diver was making like Flipper in the Pacific, the next he was doing thebreast stroke in a fire dip bucket 300 feet in the air. Apparently he extinguished exactly 5'-10" of the fire. This article was taken from the California Examiner, March20, 1998.

Some days it doesn't pay to get out of bed!

6. A man was working on his motorcycle on his patio and his wife was in the kitchen. The man was racing the engine on the motorcycle when it accidentally slipped into gear. The man, still holding on to the handle bars, was dragged through the glass patio doors and, along with the motorcycle, dumped onto the floor inside the house. The wife, hearing the crash, ran into the dining room and found her husband laying on the floor, cut and bleeding, the motorcycle laying next to him and the shattered patio door. The wife ran to the phone and summoned an ambulance. Because they lived on a fairly large hill, the wife went down the several flights of stairs to the street to escort the paramedics to her husband. After the ambulance arrived and transported the man to the hospital, thewife up righted the motorcycle and pushed it outside. Seeing that gas was spilled on the floor, the wife got some paper towels, blotted up the gasoline, and threw the towels in the toilet. The husband was treated and released to come home. Upon arriving at home, he looked at the shattered patio door and the damage done to his motorcycle. He became despondent, went tothebathroom, sat down on the toilet and smoked a cigarette. After finishing the cigarette, he flipped it between his legs into the toilet bowl while still seated. The wife, who was in the kitchen, heard the loud explosion and her husband screaming. She ran into the bathroom and found her husband lying on the floor. His trousers had been blown away and he was suffering burns on the buttocks, the back of his legs and his groin. The wife again ran to the phone to call the ambulance. The very same paramedic crew was dispatched and the wife met them at the street. The paramedics loaded the husband on the stretcher and began carrying him to the street. While they were going down the stairs to the street accompanied by the wife, one of the paramedics asked the wife how the husband had burned himself. She told them and the paramedics started laughing so hard, one of them slipped and tipped the stretcher, dumping the husband out. He fell down the remaining stairs and broke his arm. (Taken from a Florida Newspaper). Now THAT is a bad day!!