Holy Crap This Is Actually Nursing!

My second assignment as a travel nurse proved to be a much bigger challenge than the first. My agency called me Thursday evening to tell me they had a dayshift (yay!) for me on Friday. So after our first of many happy hours at Bahama Breeze, a walk across the street from our place, we called it a night and went to bed. I think I woke up at least ten times before 5 am, which is when the agency is supposed to call me to confirm my shift. I finally got my call and was confirmed to work at Spring Valley Hospital...taking care of the ICU holds...IN THE ER. Dun dun dunnnnn. No, I've never worked in an ER, let alone an ER at an unfamiliar hospital. Crap. I was pretty nervous. But I made it there, everyone seemed nice and then walking with the charge nurse to meet one of my patients, I walked into every nurse's worst nightmare at 7am. I won't go into detail, but I'll just say that I'm glad my ACLS refresher was so recent.

A few hours later, and my two patients were no longer in the ER, so I was floated up to the ICU. The charge nurse in the ER made it seem like nurses in the ICU were tripling up on patients and waiting for my butt to get up there. But once I arrived, it was like they didn't even know I was coming. Oh well. It worked out nicely for me because the charge nurse in the ICU had an easy one patient assignment that he gave to me.  This gave me the opportunity to ask a buttload of questions to all the other nurses about pretty much anything I could think of in my narrow neuro nurse mind. Ok alliteration. This was their only ICU, so it was really a MICU (medical), SICU (surgical), NICU (neuro), and CCU (cardiac) all rolled into one. As I was investigating the numerous machines, tubes and drips one patient had, I asked the nurse, "So is this one of the sickest patients you've had?" to which she replied "Oh, he's not sick...this guy is stable!" I then proceeded to ask her every question imaginable about post-operative CABG (coronary artery bypass graft) patients, which it seems this ICU gets a whole lot of.  As we chatted, she equated this patient to one of our subarachnoid hemorrhage patients back home...after you've been working there for so many years, you kind of go into auto-pilot taking care of these guys.

This ICU was a great experience, with high acuity patients and nurses that really know their stuff. I hope I get to go there again. I have a lot to learn about these general ICU patients, and I'm excited for it.

Joe and I are off to Fremont Street today, to see some real Vegas (Elvis impersonators and wedding chapels and what-not), and to do our own research on coronary artery bypasses: I give you the heart attack grill. Just kidding, this place is disgusting.