My first 12 hour shift actually working the floor start to finish. My legs are exhausted but I made it. The nurses were more receptive to help and at times enthusiastically assigned us new things to do. My patient was recovering from a cat bite on his hand. It looked terrible! Very swollen, hot, and red. He also has “a bit of Alzheimer’s” (seems to be my disease specialty lately), but just pleasantly confused and flirtatious, so it was easy to deal with. Made assessments a bit harder, but at least he’s interesting, right?
So some cool new things I got to do:
* Soaking the wound, then dressing change with an ace wrap (I love putting on ace wraps. I was a little sad that I didn’t have more injuries in dance so I could wear them)
* Administered meds using the computer scanning system
* Finger stick glucose test
* IV insertion (Failed, actually. Despite my dad’s excellent teaching both of my two tries blew. Weak veins. Always blame the patient, right? My teacher got it in by taking off the tourniquet as soon as we were in the vein to release the pressure).
* Bladder scan to check PVR (post void residual)
* Came to the rescue with air freshener after my patient had BM all over the bathroom. Psych. Not so cool.
I did plenty of other more mundane things like vitals, linen changes, helping with ambulation, etc. All in all a good day. Let’s see how I feel after another 12 hours tomorrow. I might turn out to be an 8 hour shift girl 🙂
As a hospital “Code” (eg, Code Blue = cardiopulmonary arrest; Code Red = fire), your last bullet point would be a Code Brown. Most often, Code Brown is when a patient poos in bed, in clothes, on OR table, etc. At the Retina Center, we have had all varieties of Code Brown.-Pops