First Day of Work

We went in today at 8:00 this morning and only worked till noon. We just toured the hospital and did paperwork. The hospital is very small. Its only like a 150 bed hospital. However, their NICU is huge and has 40 beds! All the other units have like 8 beds to them. None of the rooms are private most units are one big room with curtains dividing the beds. The best room you can get is a semiprivate room with 2 beds. We actually start taking care of patients tomorrow night, we'll work 11p-7a and then wed and thur 7p-7a. These are the only 3 days I know for sure because these are our only orientation days after that we're on our own! Kinda scary!!! I do know we've swapped our weekends...so for those of you at work coming to visit...we'll be working Renee's weekend but we only work friday and saturday night. Their weekend is only 2 days. We'll get the rest of this month schedule tomorrow. Even though we won't ever see the ED we were curious about it. Apparently they have 2 separate EDs, one acute and one non-acute. We sat today in the lobby right beside the ED and both me and Laura were wishing we were in there instead...we already know we are not floor nurses and I'm pretty sure we're gonna miss the fast pace. The charting for floor nurses is way different too. We've gotta do nursing diagnosis again...I haven't done that in 3 years!!! Its a lot more charting which is different from what I'm use to.

For the first year of my nursing career in the ED I had one goal...it was to not kill anybody and I didn't and still of course I don't want to kill anybody but I don't lay in bed at night going over every little thing I did with each patient the way I use to. And I've been thinking about doing floor nursing now...which I know nothing about...my goal for this job is just to not hurt anybody. It would be to not kill anybody again if I thought I'd have really sick kids but it sounds like we'll be getting the healthiest of the kids in the hospital so I don't really think I'm going to be running around pushing the code button all the time. But we're gonna see a lot of new stuff (PCA pumps, epidural pain meds, etc) so my goal is to just not hurt anybody. Hopefully I will achieve this goal over my 3 months as a floor nurse.

Sorry for the above rambling...we are getting ready now to go down the street to a jazz club called Yoshi's. I'll let you know how it is!

Update About Our Neighborhood:
So one morning I took Toto out and there were row teams out in the water rowing and a homeless man started screaming "Row, Row" in time with the team...it scared me and Toto to death so we ran back inside. I've came to the conclusion that this homeless man was the one guy who escaped from Alcatraz and was never found. I think he was cheering the row team on to freedom...anyway, the row team was out again this afternoon practicing. It is very cool to watch them and a lot of people from out apt complex was out watching them today. The coach sits in boat beside the team with a megaphone and screams at them through that. Anyway just another cool little tidbit about our complex.

One more thing...Laura started a blog (she has not finished it yet so its not really on the internet yet) so we were trying to find quotes to title hers and I came across this one which I really like and it suits me..."Without travel I would have wound up a little ignorant white Southern female, which was not my idea of a good life.". This is why I'm doing what I'm doing.