Better Than College Girls Gone Wild. I promise.

So work was suckage this past weekend, and when I mean suckage, I mean SUCKAGE.

Yesterday I was in a better mood, even though I had the immense pleasure to have, as part of my assignment, a forty-year-old domestic violence survivor with her jaw wired shut (yeah, it's like, figure out how that one got on a cardiac surgery stepdown unit. Because the jaw, you know, is, uh... kind of near the heart. Sort of. Hint: the magic word is: CHEST PAIN. These days, even if it's totally fake chest pain, it'll still buy you a tele bed.)

Hint: Just remember those two sweet little words, in case you hate being slated for a medical floor as much as the nurses there despise working on one. It's like, insta-tele bed! I'm totally gonna have to remember that when I come in for my fake "pre-syncopa"l episode--which also oddly enough seems to warrant telemetry admissions--if I don't get a tele bed to start with and they're thinking about putting me on some crappy medical floor, I'm going to start talking about my 11/10 chest pain and "EKG changes" from a previous physical. And if I don't like my roommate, I'm going for the "I had MRSA when I was hospitalized in Taipei last year," comment just so I can get my own private room. (Yeah, she tried a version of that one, too.)

Said patient was, nonetheless, able to somehow scream--albeit in a muffled, lispy sounding way--at staff (meaning me) for a couple of hours regarding what she thought was insufficient pain control, despite multiple pushes of IV narcs in the ER that would have had Andre The Giant--were he alive, bless his gentle, bonecrushing soul--down for the count for the rest of the week.

Also, curiously enough, even with her jaw wired shut she managed to have ETOH positive labs, which makes me think dear God, she had drink to her beer/vodka/rubbing alcohol with a straw.

That, my friends, is what I call desperation.

You know you're becoming a crotchety old hag of a nurse when, at seven thirty in the morning, you're doing the whole fake therapeutic response psych crap they taught you in nursing school is the way to handle angry, abusive patients in ETOH withdrawal, while secretely wondering if your patient isn't that same chic you saw on last night's episode of Cops.

Yeah, that shit doesn't bother me any more. I'm so used to crazy patients I could go in a room and talk to any one short of a psychotic serial killer and come out a minute later and just laugh my ass off because, dude, did that guy really just call us "a bunch of fucking quacks?" (If you're not a nurse, you probably think I just made that part up. But I didn't. Seriously.)

I feel obligated to tell the general public that if you ever do go into a hospital and your nurse/doctor/whomever is more than six weeks off of orientation, when we walk into your room with that great big phony smile on our face and forced air of calm, what we're really thinking is, "Okay, here's another potential nutjob. Wonder what interesting new street vocabularly and bodily substance I'm gonna have flung at me today."

Just kidding. Not really.