I was lucky last night. Out of my 4 patients, 3 were walky-talkies that didn't require too much care. 2 of them were set to go home tomorrow, so I pretty much just had to pop in every now and then to ask if they needed anything. My 4th patient, however, is a bit of a sad story. Little old lady, last year fell and broke her hip. They patched her up, and sent her back to the SNF (Skilled Nursing Facility) she lived at. While at the SNF the wound became infected. Badly. MRSA and P Vulgaris and one other bug I can't remember off the top of my head.
She'd been in a few times to get it treated with strong ABx but it didn't help. She was in ICU for awhile, and a couple days ago had an I&D and a revision, which took about 9 hours in the OR. It was like re-doing the whole hip surgery again.
Naturally she's in a bit of pain.
This woman moans if you so much as move her arm, which is odd cuz her arms are *fine*.... But I feel bad for what she's been through. She just wants to rest.
It came time for me to check her before-bed blood sugars ("HS fingerstick"), and she was in the middle of her first round of dialysis (kidneys not doing so well anymore). That can take a lot out of a person... literally lol
The dialysis nurse says "Wait, you don't need to poke her again" and grabs a TB syringe and pokes it into one of the ports on the "outgoing" dialysis tubing and draws me up a bit of blood.
I really appreciate him doing that. The patient was extremely grateful not to be stabbed again and I didn't have to do any finger-squeezing to get a good amount of blood out. Smiles all around.
On the Update side of things; I ran into the Union Rep in the hallway. She apologized again profusely, and said that she was really freaked out by what happened. After the meeting she went to one of her higher-ups and said "I'm obviously not cut out for this job, I didn't protect PurpleRN the way I needed to" and tried to quit. I think he talked her out of it, as well as told her that the stack of RRFs that J&T are painstakingly going over aren't their problem. They shouldn't have a single on on the unit. They should all be sent down to "Quality" for *them* to determine what's important enough to follow up on. It would be nice if they got a little payback....
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