A young stroke pt, a bit of fetal physiology, and some pettiness on my part

I genuinely wasn’t prepared for the popularity of this blog, or for some of the sequelae that followed it. I thought a few people might read it, get a chuckle, and glide on by. So I wrote like the blog would be gone in a month, a forgotten vanity, an echo chamber for my rambling thoughts.

Instead, you liked it. Which is alien and bizarre to me, like discovering that other people really do like the smell of your farts. Are you guys… okay?

Anyway, a lot of things happened while I was on hiatus.

I launched my kid sister at the end of the summer. It was not easy and I spent virtually all my downtime helping her fill out paperwork, set up and attend interviews, and move into her own tiny room in a house where girls rent rooms to sleep in between classes. She has a job now, and passed her GED. I am so proud.

Also, I am so glad that I can flop on my sofa in my underwear when I get home from a shift.

Aside from all that, I also went to Yellowstone for five days because I was losing my mind and my first response to stress is to go camping, and I went to a cheese festival and got constipated and drunk, and I had a shitty run-in with a pt family who heard only what they wanted to hear and reported to my manager that I had lied to them. Fortunately, my manager knows that I am a thousand percent more likely to overshare than I am to conceal, and has been my facebook friend long enough to know that withholding information about medications is not something I am physically capable of doing.

Mrs Leakey, Jelena, and Wen Li

So, uh, I’ve been on hiatus.

I’ve been working on a few chapters for a book proposal, and trying to get things pretty enough to be useful for publication, but I really REALLY prefer blogging to book writing (at least in this format) and I’d like to get back to this. So I plan to keep working on the blog, not necessarily shift-by-shift but following specific batches of pts, and work on the book between posts.

The upside to this is: I have a lot to tell you guys about. I expect to update once a week from here on out, and I actually have a backlog of posts ready to go, so there shouldn’t be any major hiccups for a while.

You have been wonderful and supportive, all of you, and I promise that if any of you is ever unfortunate enough to end up under my care, I will wipe your asses with the warm wet wipes.

(I also told a trio of trusted coworkers about my blog, so they could peek over it and make sure it’s both factual and HIPPA-compliant. All three of them immediately identified Crowbarrens. Life is good.)

Anyway. Let me tell you about Mrs. Leakey.

Week 9 Shift 1

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.