An obstetrician/ gynecologist at our hospital had a habit of falling back to sleep when she was called for a delivery or surgery. The nurses would call to let her know that her patient was ready or that one of her pregnant patients was just admitted and she needed to come in and see the patient. The problem actually arose when she was called again to remind her that she was needed. She would get very upset if, after waiting a reasonable amount of time, a nurse would call her to remind her that she had a client waiting. She always made it seem as though it was the nurse’s fault that she had fallen back to sleep. She would often belittle and yell through the phone at the nurse who dared to remind her of her job.

 I was making my rounds on the obstetrics unit one morning, when one of the nurses said to one of her co-workers, “Dr. Shawna isn’t here yet. I hate having to call her back and ask if she’s coming in. She’ll yell and scream and call me names like usual.”

I told her. “You need to be smarter than she is. Dial her number and ask “Is Louise there?” This was a time before caller I. D. “When she says ‘no’, apologize to her and tell her you must have dialed the wrong number.”

It worked like a charm. The doctor came scurrying onto the unit about fifteen minutes later; it was just long enough for her to take a quick shower, to get dressed, and to drive in.

The patient was treated, the nurses were saved from further abuse, and the doctor arrived in a pleasant mood. Case closed. There were happy nurses, a happy patient, and a happy doctor.

Janie had an extremely squeamish stomach. She could not tolerate seeing sputum, urine, or feces samples when they were placed in their clear plastic containers on the nursing station’s ledge. The containers had to be wrapped in a paper towel or she would call for the person who dared to place it there, to come back to the station to cover the specimen. Janie’s job was to complete the request form for the proper test and place it beside the offending sample.

Underneath the ledge of the nursing station was the intercom box for the unit. Janie was the one who most often answered the call bells and made announcements for “patient care needed in room #... ”

Unknown to the nursing assistant, the specimen bottle of urine had a crack in it. When she placed it on the ledge, the urine began to ooze out. It began to drip down onto the call box. Janie had seen the sample sitting there and was filling out the request for the urinalysis. She turned to place the completed chit on the ledge with the sample and noticed the urine dripping down onto the call bell system. First she gagged, holding her hand over her mouth. She jumped up, her chair shooting across the station and bouncing off the wall.  She danced in a circle, not knowing what to do. She thought “I can’t use the call box, it’s covered in urine. Even if I tried to use it, I’d get electrocuted.”

Holding her hand to her mouth, she gagged again, darted out of the station and into the hallway, grabbing the nearest person to rectify the problem. That nursing assistant brought a Styrofoam cup and placed the leaking bottle inside. She toweled off the ledge, but they had to call housekeeping and maintenance to clean and check the call bell box before Janie would even look at the intercom system again

It Was a Great Day

Although much of the day was cool and overcast, it was a great day. My son and his family are visiting from Texas. On the spur of the moment, we decided to have a picnic at Mammoth Park. The long double dip slide wasn’t slippery when we started, but the descents down the steep, metal chute became more rapid as we broke it in. Everyone rode the slide and had a lot of fun. My older daughter had nylon windbreaker pants on and she went like greased lightning. She shot off the bottom of the slide and landed on her bottom. She was a little tender, but continued to make the ride.

The foliage on the trees was beautiful. Many trees were still green, but enough had turned into their fall colors of red, orange, and yellow. The squirrels were running through the leaves on the ground from tree to tree to gather more food for the winter.

We sat around on one of the picnic tables and ate sandwiches, pretzels, cheese balls, and cookies. Not a hardy meal, but enough to fill the grandkids who were more interested in going back to ride on the slide.

Later today, we met again at my older daughter and her husband’s home for the evening meal. She made a chicken, potato, cheese, and bacon casserole. With the salad, it was enough.

After the meal, we played a few games of dominoes. I won of course. We had great a time of family bonding, talking, and laughing. That is missing in most families today. With us, it is limited due to the distance, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable and necessary. Love should always bind us closer together and never separate families.

Just a Year Ago

It’s hard to believe that a little over a year ago, I retired. I have been in the medical field either as a naval corpsman, nursing school, or as a practicing nurse since 1967. It has been a giant learning curve. Even when some days seemed repetitious, as I look back I can see the sadness, joy, and humor that was all a part of my history. That was why I have written down the stories and have shared some of them with you.

When I graduated from high school in 1967, the war in Vietnam was in full swing. Although the government didn’t call it a war, it was. Few can deny that now and being of the right age, I was torn about the idea of the military. I got a job at the Walworth Valve Company in Greensburg, Pa. thinking I could earn some money until Uncle Sam called or I made up my mind what I wanted to do. I worked there for nearly a year until I got the letter saying I could soon be drafted. I knew that I didn’t want to be a Marine or Army soldier, so I enlisted in the Navy.

I was always interested in the field of medicine and signed on as a candidate for being corpsman. It was the one thing for which there was a demand. They were being injured and killed in Vietnam at that time. In basic training, one wise cracking first lieutenant asked, “How many are going to be corpsmen?” Several of us held up our hands. He proceeded to say, “Do you know the lifespan of a corpsman in Vietnam?” He finished by saying, “From the time they leave the boat until they almost reach the shore.” This added greatly to the pressure of boot camp.

My duty stations were in Orlando Florida and in Keflavik, Iceland. I never got to Vietnam, but lost buddies there. I got “early outs” to go to college and earned my bachelor of science in nursing in three years. I worked at Monsour medical center for a year before starting at Frick and worked there until my retirement. I worked the night shift for three years on a medical/ surgical floor. Then I worked the emergency department for five years.

Management approached me and asked if I would take one of the nursing supervisor jobs. After some soul searching I agreed. The supervisors had a lot of responsibilities in the day to day function of the hospital, from assigning of beds, making sure there was adequate staffing, finding coverage for sick call-offs, and other and various problems and complaints from staff, patients, and visitors.

A little over a year ago, after thirty-four years at Frick, I decided to retire and am trying to share those parts of my life in what I am now putting in my blog spot.

 

When a Tree Falls...

It was the week before Christmas and a young, mentally challenged young man was admitted to one of our general services units. He loved to draw. The nurses found some crayons and gave him leftover computer paper.  His pictures were taped to the walls in his room and all over the nursing station. He was able to walk and talk. He would come to the station to talk with the nurses and to look at his art work.

The only thing that competed with his passion for drawing was the artificial Christmas tree in the waiting area. It was an older tree. Its branches looked like dark green bottle brushes and the needles were just that stiff. It had gold tinsel with red and gold ornaments.

He would wander to the lounge and lean forward until he could touch the branches. Pointing with a finger, he would single out each ball as though he was counting them. He didn’t touch them, but seemed fascinated by their shiny surfaces.

Late one evening the nurses heard a crash and glass breaking. They rushed to the lounge to see what had happened. “What happened?” the first nurse into the room asked.

The young man was sitting across the room from the downed tree and was saying. “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!”

One nurse helped him back to his room while others righted the tree and re-hung the bulbs that were still intact. The ward clerk called for housekeeping to sweep up the balls that had broken.

As the nurses attempted to make order from the havoc, they noticed the “gifts” that were under the tree had finger n holes poked in the wrapping paper. (The gifts were just empty boxes that had been wrapped in bright paper and bows to add to the Christmas tree look.)

We were never sure whether he had tipped the tree while he was “counting” the balls or whether he knocked it over when he was checking out the gifts.

Looking For Her Old Man

There have been times that I’ve been only surprised and then there were times that I was completely shocked. I was working in the triage area of the emergency department, when a man walked in with the seat of his pants covered in blood. He was pressing a towel tightly against his bottom. I hurried him inside and helped the other nurses remove his pants and underwear while keeping pressure over the area that he had been covering. His pants had an almost three inch tear across the seat of his trousers. When we removed his clothes, we began to wash off the blood as we moved closer and closer to the injury.

We needed to see what had been cut and how large it was. Changing the towel for an ABD pad, we could see its size. It was nearly as long as the rip in his pants.

            While we were cleaning and assessing the wound, the man explained that he had been at a party and was shoved onto an empty beer bottle that had been left on a chair. “It shattered and cut me.”

            The glass shard had cut him deeply. It had lacerated his anal sphincter. When the emergency room doctor saw the depth of the wound and its location, he said, “Keep the pressure on it and notify the surgeon on call.”

            The other nurses started an I. V., started a dose of antibiotic, and began to get the man readied for the operating room. I went back to man my post in the triage area.

I hadn’t been there long when a teenage girl walked in; she looked about thirteen or fourteen. I asked her, “May I help you?”

Flippantly and disrespectfully she said, “Yeah, I’m looking for my old man.”

This was in the early 1970’s and such a cavalier attitude was unusual and unexpected.

“What’s your father’s name?” I asked.

Her answer almost bowled me over. I could hardly believe my ears.

Without giving me the name, she chirped, “He’s the one with the new asshole!”

Rambling Wreck

We had finished treating a middle aged woman for vomiting and a migraine headache. She was discharged from the emergency department. When her husband went to get the car, I pushed her out under the covered canopy seated in a wheelchair. I stood alongside her, watching as a car approached. It drove up the inclined driveway and under the portcullis, the overhead lights of the parking lot reflected off the glass surface to reveal that the whole wind shield was spider webbed with tiny cracks running from one side of the car to the other.

When the car stopped near the wheelchair, I moved the woman closer to the car to help her. I opened the passenger’s door for her to climb inside. As I lifted the latch and pulled the door open, it dropped about one half inch on its hinges. I held onto it, making sure that it wasn’t going to fall off and to be absolutely sure it wasn’t going to crush my toes.

 Now for the big surprise, when I looked inside, the front passenger’s seat was an apple crate turned upside down with a burlap sack thrown over it. I couldn’t say anything. I was in complete shock.

You learn early as a nurse, not to say anything that might insult a patient. I managed to keep my mouth shut and help the woman from the wheel chair onto her “seat”. I pulled the wheelchair away from the car and slowly inched the car door shut. When I reached about the last two inches, I lifted on the door handle a bit and pushed the car door shut. I was afraid to slam it. I didn’t want to have it fall off, jam, or have window fall out.

As the car pulled away and I turned to go back into the emergency room with the wheelchair, I saw a movement out of the corner of my eyes. I turned to look. The tail light had fallen out of the back end of the car’s fender and was resting on the rear bumper. The wires were still attached and the tail light was still burning. I just shook my head not believing what I had just witnessed and went back inside.

Once I had stowed the wheelchair, I told the other nurses in the emergency room what had just happened. One of the nurses asked, as she began to laugh “Did you fasten her seatbelt?”

I turned and said to her, “You know, I tied that binder twine as tight as I could!”

Later, that evening I was talking to one of the guards and when I mentioned the car. He told me, “I was talking to the driver while he was in the waiting area. He said ‘I know I shouldn’t be driving that car. It is in really bad shape, but my wife was sick and didn’t have anything else to drive.’”