It took me a whole extra day to recover from my three night shifts this week. And, no, I’m not being sarcastic. I usually sleep for the greater part of 24 hours after three 12+ hours nights in a row because you only ever get to sleep about 5, maybe 6 hours, in between if you’re lucky— and nursing is just a physically and emotionally exhausting job. This week, though, it was more like 48 hours.
Covid19 patients are back in force, and just like the news reports say, it is mostly young people this time around. Don’t let your guard down!!! This is not over, everyone! There is no safe place to just take off your mask and relax, maybe not even at home, depending on what your “housemates” are up to….
This week, a colleague had her last day. She’s moving back to the east coast and I’m going to miss her like crazy! We’ve been wishing her goodbye in crazy ways for weeks now— because you get really close to your workmates when it feels like you’re at war together. Sunday night was Filet o’ Fish night. I can’t even explain the in joke really, just that there were piles of sandwiches and lots of hilarious fish jokes to be had.
Monday night was like an old fashioned flogging. One admission after another. And the patients just got sicker and sicker. It took all night, and more, to stabilize a patient who came out of the OR (operating room) with a new liver but also possibly no blood in his body. We used a rapid infuser to push nearly 40 units of combined blood products into him in 2 hours while starting dialysis to correct his metabolic acidosis, drawing labs every 30 minutes, and then identifying the source of his bleeding—- preexisting esophageal varices (which bled nearly 4 liters once we put in a tube to suction his stomach!). And so, I had a “first” in the ICU— hard to do after more than a dozen years. We put a Minnesota tube in a fresh liver transplant patient. If you’ve never had the luxury of working with a Minnesota tube, it’s like an octopus you wrangle down someone’s throat and then inflate the head and one leg to put pressure on bleeding areas of the upper stomach and esophagus. It’s a hot mess.
When I got back Tuesday night, my Last night for the week, I was happy to find our liver patient doing well. He was still critically ill, but it looked like the liver had started to function— so he had stopped bleeding. As we like to joke in the hospital, we blamed all his problems squarely on the anesthesiologist for “under rescuitating” the patient during surgery. Of course, the course of a surgery, especially a transplant, is much more complicated than that…. but we like to joke about someone being to blame and since anesthesia is never there to defend themselves…. hahaha oh. I may have even said we should make an anesthesiologist voodoo doll. Is thus taking it too far? Hmm, seems memeworthy to me!
When it’s my last night, I need extra coffee. Extra to wake up, extra to keep going at midnight, and extra for the ride home. There is literally nothing I love more than coffee. Luckily, we have a way of showing each other the love at work by making coffee and sharing a little love note by the coffee machine too. Keeps us going!