Belltown

I accepted a job offer out at a facility in The Greater Seattle Metropolitan Area, on what sounds like a cardiac surgical and intervention floor.

I'm hoping, what with New Hospital's reputation for being an excellent teaching hospital, that it doesn't turn out to be a lot of Fake Cardiac, with the fake-at-best to nonexistent protocols and fakey medical staff wandering around saying things like, 'So, he's swirling the drain without IV access? He's a full code? Yeah, so he'll die a full code. No, I'm not sending him to intensive care."

I'd love to have a tape recorder around when doctors say these horrible things. I don't care if it's not admissible in court. Families should be able to hear this kind of stuff, especially with compromised loved ones, who can't talk and move, like this guy was.

I know this is not going to be a popular opinion, but when you see this kind of indifference to human life on a daily basis, you wonder why the media gets all worked up about the random, violent deaths of 32 young college students, and not the fact that hundreds of patients on a daily basis are subject to the a no-less horrifying death in some crappy-ass hospital. And, instead of a few seconds to a few minutes of suffering--these patients often go through days, weeks and sometimes months of hell, with no one successfully advocating for them.

God knows I've tried, and God knows I've watched other nurses try for shifts and shifts and shifts until the person finally codes, or some doctor finally gets that the problem isn't the stupid, annoying nurses who keep paging during good sex all night long, the problem is that the patient is fucking sick as hell, and needs more or a different kind of care.

So, I'm trying to figure out why I should care as much as the media seems to think I should (eg for days and days and days post shooting about thirty two kids I've never even met) when I've taken care of well over that amount of patients by now who didn't even get a well-paid attending to give a shit about their change in condition or imminent death.

Yeah, kids shooting kids to death = really fucked up and very, very bad.
But, this happens all the time in countries overrun by militant, corrupt governments or rebel political parties. It also happens right here on the streets of America, albeit usually in lower numbers per incident, but it still happens.

So, I don't get the media. Why act all bewildered and shocked that such a horrible thing could happen? Do we seriously think our country is any better because our kids only get shot up en masse every 10 years or so? And, have those media newswhores ever read a tenth grade world history textbook, and looked at all the torture and slave labor of the past, and realize this isn't new?

I guess those people are counting on Middle America to have a real fucking short attention span.

And guess what.

Middle America does.