07/31/2020
Would you believe if I told you that I haven’t posted in (insert # of days/weeks like I even bothered to look) forever because I’ve been busy? Well, I’d be lying. I have been working 3 or 4 days a week then having 3 or 4 days off and repeat. I like to think I’ve been busy but to be honest, no.
On the 3 days in a row when I work, there is literally no time for anything else though. I wake up between 4:30 and 5pm. Get ready for work, including make lunch (praying there’s food in the house since pandemic grocery shopping is the worst), and leave at 6pm. I get to work usually around 6:35-6:45 depending on traffic and take a few minutes to “print my list,” which is my giant tree-killing summary of each patient in the ICU and their one-liner H&P, chief compliant, and major events. This one-liner of course is more like a one-paragrapher…
We start each shift with a huddle at 18:55 and then I’m off to the races for the next 12 hours. I spend my shift breaking nurses, admitting patients, communicating with family members & doctors, in rounds, putting out fires, wiping butts, assisting in procedures, and getting report for the next shift. Whatever the night may need. After giving charge nurse report on an average of 26-32 patients, I only hope to leave before 8:30 when the parking garage will charge me $8 to get out. If I’m leaving this late, something bad happened. And it happens about once every two weeks.
I get home on average at 9am and try desperately to fall asleep by 10. Sometimes the adrenaline is still rushing through me from an end-of-shift emergency, or I have to eat because I simply didn’t have time to all shift–and I will not be able to sleep on a stomach that has likely been empty since a protein bar inhaled on the way to work at 6pm yesterday. Days like this, I hope not to be checking the time on my phone, which is shoved under a pillow next to me as I sleep.
And I get up and do it all again.
For those 3 days, I am, yes, “crazy busy” but then comes my three or four days off in a row… These frequent days off are the reason some people joke “how can you be tired; you only work three days a week?” Oh hell, I think there’s probably even a meme for that…
So then, those days off? What are they if not busy? The answer is complicated, especially since I work night shift. When I get home from my third shift, I go to sleep by 10 like normal. But I let myself sleep until whenever I wake up– usually until 6 or 7. I wake up like a zombie, stumbling to the kitchen for coffee and food. I’m pretty useless at this point, still tired from the work week. I stay up to watch some tv, maybe do some laundry– although as I type this, I’ll admit that is unlikely. And I’m back in bed by 10pm. My first day off, spent entirely sleeping…
There are weeks where no matter how much I sleep, I don’t feel rested. Days when co-workers are restlessly texting me about this problem or that, and I feel a weight of responsibility as I take their confessions
But as this pandemic and its necessary quarantine continue into its sixth month, my colleagues and I cling to each other. We are bound by what we’ve seen and done. We are a “quarantine family” of essential workers–and though we wear our masks, we cannot control how close we get to each other. Some days, we work shoulder to shoulder–arms crossed–to turn and lift patients, to hold pressure on bleeding wounds, to change dressings.
Now that we’re doing elective surgeries and the first three months of strict shelter-at-home orders, the ICU is busier than ever. Way too many cases of pancreatitis from months of heavy drinking, severe heart failure from heart attacks overlooked when people were too scared to go to the hospital. Kidney, liver, and heart transplants. Drug overdoses, and cardiac arrests–sometimes it seems like 5 homeless or near-homeless people found down and resuscitated every day. Their u-tox reports telling the story of despair and mental illness and drug addiction that plague our cities: meth, opiates, sky-high alcohol levels.
I spend my days off thinking about these patients. That first CT scan showed a lack of grey/white matter differentiation, a very poor prognosis and likely anoxic brain injury for our Joe Doe cardiac arrest patient. What had happened to him? Did they find out his name? Did the police have to come fingerprint him? And what about the woman whose chest we opened at the bedside? We all watched as the cardio-thoracic surgeon retracted the ribs, suctioning out & washing away blood and clots from around the heart. Then he searched for whatever might be bleeding, suturing tiny blood vessels and covering with small pieces of dissolvable clotting material.
