I showed up late for work by about five minutes, having lost track
of time while I was standing in the shower performing my usual morning
devotional of cursing, groaning, and ordering myself grimly to wake up, come
on, you can do it.
Any time I’m late to work I sort of creep in from the staff
elevators and try to sidle up behind the group report cluster without being
seen. No luck this time—a bright-faced unfamiliar nurse called out: “You must
be Elise!”
Turns out I was precepting today. Okay. Surprise?
Maycee has moved on to another preceptor—each new nurse gets
two days with each preceptor, to make sure they get a good variety of teaching
methods. I like precepting and am pretty good at it, but everyone
learns differently, and I have precepted more than one person who
wasn’t really meshing with my style and needed someone a little more methodical
and hands-on. Today I would be precepting Anne, who loves airplanes
and hiking and pictures of gross wounds, and who was very patient while I
poured half a carton of milk into a cup of ditchwater coffee from the supply
room dispenser, then thousand-yard-stared my way through the first half of it
before my brain came back online.
Our pt was a tall, strikingly pretty older woman who had
been very active and independent before she fell last night, smacked her head
on something, and developed a huge head bleed—a subdural hematoma. There are
several different types of common head bleed, and this is not usually the
deadliest, but an SDH can really wreck your shit.
