Lots to learn

 This is gonna be one of those word vomit blogs with not many pictures - warning you now. Ok well this week has been a week. Let's just say after a glorious summer with only a little stress coming from some fun travels - my psoriasis is back after this week. yay. The beginning of the week was spent in stg I guess - seems like that was a couple weeks ago, but here is a picture of me and jack to prove that I was indeed in stg 6 days ago...

We found Oreo ice cream sandwiches in the deep freeze, pretty tasty. Tuesday morning I drove back up north and spent the rest of that day meal prepping for work and getting some homework started for the week. Wednesday was a good work day - I charge most Wednesdays and it was busy, but good.

In a little bit of downtime we had Alex did my hair all fancy. My favorite part of this picture though is you can see our commode popcorn on the desk. Yes, we pop popcorn and all eat it out of cardboard bowls that people use to poop in. It's just a very normal thing we do that I think probably sounds absurd to people outside the hospital. Anyways that night was a few more errands and a little bit of studying. The longest part of the week started Thursday. This might be something only bedside nurses will understand, but I'm writing this for my memories. Well Thursday I had three patients. Two straight forward knee and hip guys and one very very sick lady. My two guys were pretty independent, but as the nurse I'm still in charge of scheduled medications, pain meds every four hours, iv abx, charting, walking with them, going over discharge instructions and so forth. Then I had Edna. She had her knee revised last in august. It became septic and now this admission she is here for abdominal pain. She has been worked up for a ton of things and the doctors still just have question marks. Well during her stay it seems she has just been declining. She fell on Wednesday and over that night developed a slight kidney injury. Not to mention she has heart failure with +3 edema in all extremities. Oh and her face and eyes are jaundiced which shows some sort of liver damage as well. So nothing really good. Oh also her skin is as fragile as can be so her fall on Wednesday landed her with 5 new skin tears - and I would say the majority of them are pretty bad skin tears. She is no longer walking and on my shift on Thursday she had maybe 20mls of urine output. Which reminds me - I attempted my first female foley on her. Yeah the female anatomy is wayyy more tricky than the male. So poor edna is just going down hill. Which meant a lot of labs, urine samples, stool samples (for her loose stools), new meds and so forth. The docs placed an order for 300ml of albumin to give. Albumin comes in these tricky glass bottles that sometimes drip and sometimes don't so you have to watch them closely. 300ml is 6 different 50ml bottles that you have to replace every 30minutes and hope the line doesn't run dry. So albumin equals pretty much being in the room with the patient for 3 hours straight. I was able to discharge one of my other guys, but since I was the first to discharge I was also the first to receive a new patient which sucked. I got another pretty busy man out of the ICU who is a recent heart transplant patient who had his appendix rupture which caused tons of complications. Anyways long story still long - it was a very long day and this is why I texted my family saying I hadn't peed since I left my house that morning. The saddest thing was I didn't even have the urge I needed to pee because I hadn't eaten or drinken anything that day anyways. But 6:20pm I finally peed. I guess me and edna both had a little bit of a kidney injury that day. I drove home with a blank stare of exhaustion. My back was aching and as I lay in bed with my laptop open I continued to blank stare at my computer. I was so exhausted that all I wanted to do was honestly cry in that moment. Instead of crying or doing homework I thought it'd be best if I just went to bed, so I did - knowing I was waking up to take care of those same busy patients the next day. 

Ok Friday - it was my 8 hour shift which gave me motivation to tackle the day. I had discharged my one other guy later in the day so all I had was edna and Mr. Kirk the heart transplant. Mr. Kirk was getting the IV version of mycophenalate which is an anti rejection medication. We give it orally all the time, but I guess in IV form it has to be treated like a chemo because of how toxic it is. So Karlene, my boss, rounded up a chemo nurse from downstairs to show us how to gown up and use all the special tubing and how to be safe giving such drugs. Kind of exciting, but in the same breath just another thing to add to my busy day. Edna received another 4 hours worth of albumin which took up a lot of time. At one point during the infusion some men came to visit her. I left for a few minutes to give them some time to talk. When I went back to check on her, I knocked then walked in and they were giving her a blessing, so I stepped back out and shut the door (my albumin line went dry - but for a good reason I guess). It's interesting how my feelings changed after this. Before I knew she was a member I was still treating to the best of my abilities and doing so with as much compassion as I could doing everything I could to make her comfortable. But, I think my outlook changed. Instead of this patient that kept me busy all day long (for the record it was the doctors giving me orders all day long on her due to how ill she was) I was able to have more patience in the situation and desire to do even better. I guess you could even say I saw her more as a child of god instead of some old lady. I was able to leave around 3:30pm that day, treated myself to my favorite pizza place for dinner and then spent the evening doing a group project for school. The best part of all of this was I was asleep by 8:20pm. 

I felt rejuvenated with all that sleep to tackle my last day of work. I had Edna and Mr. Kirk once again. I received good news that Mr. Kirk was going to be discharged and I knew I would only have Edna the rest of the day. I cranked out all the stuff for Mr. Kirk early so that I could have a ton of time with Edna. Saturdays are also usually better days at the hospital because there aren't as many doctors giving orders all day long, so I knew Id have some extra time to really take care of Edna. The morning was spent doing medications, an EKG, another 7 bottles of albumin, a bed bath, changed all 7 of her dressing, getting her up to the chair and then getting her all comfy in the chair with The Intern on the TV, some oxycodone and a popsicle. She was a happy camper. She had some visitors stop by during lunch, then I got her up into a wheelchair and took her outside for some sunshine. I drove her out to our little garden area on campus and we sat and talked for 30 minutes. I showed her pictures of me holding tarantulas and snakes and told her I was a weird bug girl. She told me while in the service she always wanted to travel the world, but for some reason they kept sending her to SLC or somewhere close by. As we got back inside and passed the nurses station the other nurses asked her how it was and her response was "that was awesome!" There's a lot of days you leave the hospital feeling like a crappy nurse or that you just did the bare minimum, but Im grateful that that day I had the opportunity to be a good nurse. I got her comfy back in bed right as a few more visitors came to see her. It was a good day. I wish I could immediately see everyone the way God sees them. That Saturday I could've left Edna in bed all day and spent more time selfishly scrolling social media or even doing homework, but Im glad I was able to serve Edna. That night I squoze in some grocery shopping so I would have food for Sunday dinner and then finished off the night with MORE homework! Once again going to bed exhausted, but this time being able to sleep in! This week has been quite the scary glance into the future though. Im not even doing clinical hours yet and boy, it's been hard to find time to do much of anything else besides school and work. But I find joy in doing hard things - so I will continue this hard thing. Nothing in life that's worth doing is easy right?

Which leads me to my last thought - church today! Jesse and I went to stake conference in Karees stake. President Weber (the stake president that gave me my temple recommend) spoke today and talked about an experience he had while bungee jumping in New Zealand. As he was standing on the platform, 47 meters up, the worker said something to him that he shared with us. "The longer you wait, the harder it gets" I immediately started thinking of everything this phrase applies to. First, school. Im grateful I started my masters program when I did. Prolonging that opportunity allows for other things to get in the way. Creating good habits is another thing I thought about. For example running. The longer you wait to train for a marathon the harder that marathon will be and possibly the more you just won't complete it at all. And of course good habits such as reading scriptures. As of right now I really relate to waiting for scripture study. I used to be in a good habit where I couldn't allow myself to go to bed without reading at least a little bit. Somehow I got out of the habit and havent been able to resume that nightly routine. And yes, the longer I wait the easier it has gotten to not read my scriptures. So it's late, but Im going to read my scriptures. Anyways, kind of a cool little quote to get us all started on some better habits and ways of life. OK glad I had a somewhat relaxing Sunday now time to get back to it tomorrow.