a ramble

This post is going to ramble, so please bear with me. Over the last few weeks I've had several great ideas for posts; however, by the time I get home from work, my brain is mush and I choose a hot shower and my bed over my blog.

Work has been crazy lately. As the final weeks of summer approach, so many of the surgeons go into overdrive and book a million OR cases so they can go away on vacation. Makes sense, right? Wrong! What it means is that the OR's are overbooked, the PACU cannot absorb all the patients, and the ICU's end up absorbing the patients as "boarders". This past month, we have been getting a ton of ENT/Plastic patients with flaps. In the last week alone we got three of them fresh out of the OR (anywhere from 9-14 hour long surgeries). Aside from the regular tasks of recovering a patient, these patients come back on the ventilator and have q15min pulse checks It's agony. Last weekend I was in charge, had an intubated 75% burn, had an uncontrolled diabetic on an insulin gtt, and had to take a flap patient. Assignments were so horrendous I could do nothing but go home and drink wine, lots and lots of winelaugh. Okay, I drank some wine too! Later that same week, things got ugly. We only had 11 nurses for 36 patients; given that four of them needed 1:1 care and each had at least a two hour burn care/dressing change each shift, plus a pediatric ICU patient who on the verge of being intubated, we weren't in a good place for accepting these boarder patients. We got our managers involved and they talked to their managers. We were told that we can't refuse to accept a patient due to staffing. Which is funny, because we weren't refusing, but we were stating that accepting these patients is a huge safety issue. Oh well, guess they'd rather risk a lawsuit than give us an extra nurse or let us hire more nurses. Right, because that makes much more sense....

Other notable work related things-
1. Commenting to a family member of a patient with 75% burns and a 104 degree fever that "She's burning up."
Poor choice of words, and I felt like an ass.

2. Celebrating Danielle's birthday on Long Island.
After a terribly long work day, we all ventured out to Long Island for a night of drinks and celebrating. Getting chauffeured by our DD in her huge new Pathfinder, Leslie went ass of teakettle into the 3rd row seat while wearing a dress. We danced to cheesy coverband music that we proudly sang along with, we had cupcake/frosting fight in the bar, and then took shots of Jaugermeister and SoCo and Tequila. But by far, my favorite part of the night was when we returned back to the city and Alison was walking down the street yelling, "MB (aka Dr. Matt)? MB? Where do you live?" Then she and Leslie accompanied me to Paulas's apartment so we could feed her cats while she is away on her honeymoon. I think we probably freaked the cats out...three drunks girls, winded from climbing the five flights of stairs, whispering "here kitty kitty." Wonder what the security cameras thought of us that night.

Non-work related things-
My friends got married this weekend in Westchester. Of course it was an adventure getting there. I accidentally grabbed the directions to the reception, NOT the hotel where I was staying so when we got to the Country Club and tried calling the hotel for directions, we got so lost. The girl who answered the phone was quite a airhead who was clearly directionally challenged. She told us to go south the the CC Expressway and then head east on 119. However, we really needed to go north of the CC Expressway and then head west. After 2 hours of driving around Scarsdale, we finally made it to the hotel just in time to change and take the party bus BACK to the country club. Thank God it was 6 hours of open bar because my nerves were shot. Did I mention that the party bus was too wide to make one of the turns so we took out a few tree branches and then still couldn't; make the turn so we almost missed the ceremony! The dancing and DJ was awesome. So much so that I ruined my bargain silk dress with sweat and wine. Let's hope the dry cleaner can take away all my sins!