One of the nurses on my unit starts out report with a little synopsis I always find amusing, "Well, we broke the guy in room twenty, but we fixed a couple of people, but then we broke one of them again."
It's always a good feeling when you help to fix someone.
Like yesterday, I had a guy, two days out of CABG surgery, with a massively lousy 'crit and hypotension to best anyone's syncope diagnosis. We had d/c'ed his chest tubes, only to figure out we'd given him a pneumo in some random lung space and so he had to have another one placed, and his vein graft incision site was oozing (and had a bandage on it that looked like... well, I'm guessing a nurse didn't do that dressing, that's all I'm saying).
So we transfused him yesterday, I got him all washed up and his incision dressed properly, and today, he was like almost brand new.
His wife even brought me kimbob, which is kind of like Korean sushi. And I had been craving sushi all week long. She said they really liked me and thought I was a good nurse.
I was thinking secretely, "Then you must not have been watching real carefully when I accidentally backprimed some of his unit of blood into the saline bag."
Well, not all of it.
Any hoo.
It's so rewarding to see my patients get better,and get up walking around whereas the day before they were so tired and weak they couldn't get out of bed. It's so much better than running around frantically for twelve hours, trying to get somebody, anybody to care that your patient is dying, and then watch them die any way because no one except you appeared to care, and you couldn't do anything about it.
Even Foley Bag Guy couldn't ruin my day. I helped fix a patient. I helped them get better. It's what I got into nursing for (that and the chance to steal used foley bags, of course)! Too bad I had to wait an entire year to feel this way about the profession, isn't it?
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