Phthalocyanine thoracic corset
  • Home
  • Clinical information about PEx
    • Research articles
    • Videos and links
  • Blog
  • Art, quilts, creative stuff
  • About me
    • Images of me and my screwy cartilage
    • Post Nuss imaging

The brace arrived

2/17/2016

0 Comments

 
...and it is as uncomfortable as I expected.  Dr. J suggested I order it early, and get used to wearing it.  Fewer changes post-op, and better posture going into it.  I'm going to try to wear it for two hours tomorrow.  No idea if it will even fit right under the scrubs.  (Not like my body fits right under the scrubs, but you know what I mean.)

It's 9?  weeks out before surgery.  Some stuff happened at work last week that's set my stress level spiralling stupidly.  I really had a plan.  I was crosstraining all my people.  Had everything lined up for the poster thing, and even though my data sucked, other people disagreed.  (They were wrong, but I suppose if your poster colors are pretty, people don't actually do the math?)  (I don't know.)  (Possibly nurses are not expected to do math.)  (Talked to a statistician, a guy much younger than I'd expected with many letters behind his name and probably an IQ that is some factorial degree higher than mine.  Was refreshing to take less than five minutes to do what we'd blocked out an hour to accomplish.  He said my numbers don't suck, but the numbers won't make sense until next year, which is what I've been thinking all along.)  (Whatever.  I am making pretty colors.)

Everything was going fine, and now we're doing something completely different, that is totally out of my control, and will happen (they think...but...shyeah, I'd like to see you try it in that timeframe) while I am gone.  Awesome.  My clinic is divorcing.  Which needs to happen.  But...since I'm, you know, the charge nurse, kinda concerned about how this goes.  For both parties.  And again, not everyone knows.  Because again, there's nobody drivin this train.  If this really happens, it derails a lot of my carefully laid plans.

So last week, I shut down and got indifferent.  Which isn't like me at all, and is not pleasant.  Because deep down, I care about what happens to my people.  My people = my patients and my colleagues.  All my people.

So.  I'm trying to grind my way through the feeling of just throwing everything up in the air and watching it all fall down.

Today wasn't bad.  Wednesdays are more fun than most days of the week, no matter how busy.  And the afternoon was good.  We had a patient down (he recovered, but we shipped him out via the firefighters), but I felt useful and my people did their jobs quickly and calmly, and I was proud of us.  I don't know if I actually accomplish things on Wednesdays, but I feel like I'm everywhere.  Talking to patients, giving nebulizer treatments, dipping urines, giving shots, fixing problems.  I'm not undeadifying people anymore, but it's just fine.  Undeadifying takes so much more out of you.  It's okay to give shots and nebulizer treatments and listen to little old ladies tell stories.  

There was an un-fun part.  Had polite and sharp words a few times with the one provider with whom I do not get along.  (Out of the 56 total...there's just the one.)  It was stupid and annoying.  But whenever you cross words with someone who is (whether either of this likes it or not, or this is in any way accurate or not) of lower status than you in front of other people....you just look like an asshole.  I do not correct the people I supervise in front of other people.  When a doc crosses words with a nurse in front of patients, much less other providers and nurses, without some obvious and glaring reason for doing so, they look like an asshole.  To all colleagues present, and definitely to the patients.  And when the nurse is polite and reasonable in response, regardless of the daggers coming out of her eyes...well.  *shrug*  I'm done here.  It's boring.

And with the changes coming in my clinic, it's completely irrelevant. 

My cat is missing me.  She's sitting above my head, wrapping her tail around my face and purring.  I think she's in stage IV kidney disease.  She's losing weight.  She's losing her appetite.  She has mats in her fur for the first time in her life that she cries when I try to comb them out.  She's not jumping well, but it doesn't appear to be from pain.  I knew a guy who knows how to do cat dialysis.  Real dialysis, not just SQ saline boluses.  I could take her in to see what her creatinine is, but they'd just want to do a bunch of crap to her.  A blood pressure (traumatic for a cat).  Dental work.  A ton of vaccines that she doesn't need, being a housecat and only around Beau.  

If I sound like a problem-dumping old woman, you would not be wrong about this.  I don't blog when I'm all bouncy happy about having my sternum ripped up out of the dent in my chest.  I'll try to remember that the next time I feel that way. 

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    I'm a middle aged nurse with a hole in my chest.  I created this because I'm intending to have that fixed.
    I used to paint, and now I make quilts.  But I'm not done painting.
      In addition to working full time, I am picking at a master's (though I haven't yet committed to a master's in what.)

    Archives

    May 2018
    July 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015

Proudly powered by Weebly