Retail therapy

Shirley caught a cold earlier this week, and she shared it with the rest of the family. I hope I'm over it (or have stopped coughing) before work starts on Wednesday!

While I'm very grateful that starched white dresses are no longer required attire for nurses, I've grown weary of the ubiquitous scrubs. While I appreciate the fact that they come in an amazing array of colors, the fact remains that their stain-resistant fabrics, bright prints featuring a variety of cartoon characters, and smock-inspired styling makes me feel slightly unprofessional. Next to the white-coated MDs, I feel like I might as well be wearing pajamas to work.

So you can imagine how overjoyed I was to learn that business casual attire is required at my new employers. Finally, a good excuse to get out my iron (okay, I'm lying with that one, as I've only recently realized that my ironing board is in the garage, precisely where the movers left it a year ago) and my dress clothes. Then I checked through my closet and discovered that not only did I only own one pair of dress slacks but the majority of my tops are summer clothing.

So today, in spite of my nasty cold, I somehow found the strength to go shopping. (It's amazing stuff, Shopping is. They really ought to market it as a cure for the common cold. "Feel sniffly? Try Shopping! You'll feel better in minutes!") I'm hoping some cute new outfits go a long way towards allaying my nerves about starting a new job.

Que dia es hoy?

Ever forget what day of the week it is? I've never been particularly talented when it comes to time-management, but working nights has not helped.

Perhaps it's the fact that when I leave for work, it's Wednesday, but when I come home from work, it's now Thursday. Maybe it's how magically, every single night, I have to change the date on my charting when the clock turns over from 2359 to 0000. Or even the fact that on occasion, (this is Oregon I'm talking about) I have left for work, worked twelve or thirteen hours, returned from work, and then awakened after sleeping for several hours without seeing a single ray of sunshine!

When you're doing a neurological assessment on patients, it's important to make certain they're "oriented" to person, place/situation, and time. This means that my patient who answered the orientation questions with "Paul Revere," "1956," and "Amityville, Texas" was "oriented times zero." (To be fair, "Mr. Revere" had experienced such a catastrophic stroke that we were delighted that he was talking at all, regardless of whether or not he made sense.)

I know who I am, where I'm at, and (usually) what's going on, but without Microsoft's calendar on every computer, I don't have a prayer of guessing the day correctly. Guess I'm "oriented times two."

Gender issues

Nursng is traditionally a woman's role. Of the ten students I graduted with, only one was a man.
The male nurses I've had the chance to work with have been great, but occasionally the "gender issues" make working with them slightly odd.

Usually when it's only female staff working, our break room lunch time conversations revolve around fashion, celebs and kid and husband stuff. When the male staff are working with us, it can be a bit stilted. (And we generally pass on the discussions on how great Victoria Secret's semi- annual sale is--not that I think the guys would object to that topic of conversation.) Damn fine nurses, but a bit awkward nonetheless.

Because there are so few male nurses, patients also respond to them differently than they do to "you gals." Confused patients are notorious for mistaking male nurses for doctors. And even mentally competent patients often accept what the male nurses say with more authority than they do similar statements from me.

And after spending the last shift doing 1:1 nursing on a sweet elderly lady with dementia who yanked out her IV (twice!) repeatedly pulled off her heart monitor leads, and was spectacularly paranoid about allowing the staff to clean up her bloody sheets, give her oxygen, or give her important medications while screaming "you girls are all in this together!" at the top of her lungs, I really appreciate male nurses. Especially Billy and Jim *, who were kind enough to help me out by using their masculine charms to convince her to let them put in a new IV and get a quick shot of a handy antipsychotic.

*Any and all co-workers who may be mentioned in my blog have had names, ages, (occasionally genders) and other identifying details changed. Why? Because this blog is all about me.

Solidarity

In spite of all the insanity of the last month (which has included two patients leaving AMA, learning the hard way what "mandatory reporter" means under California law, and caring for an elderly Spanish-speaking lady who refused to believe that I was a woman until someone told her I was pregnant) I like my new job. I'm still getting used to it, and there are many days where I get done with my charting, drive home, and think "Thank God it's day shift!" but overall, I enjoy my work.

Unfortunately, I was hired on in the middle of a six-month long labor dispute between the hospital's parent company and the California Nurses Association. In mid-October, I was actually in the Kansas City airport preparing to visit family in Washington when I saw "[Name of Corporation] nurses on strike at ten Bay Area hospitals!" on CNN and realized "Oh my God! I just got hired by them!"

So as the negotiations between the union and the administration have continued and bogged down once more, I have made no secret of the fact that "I have no idea what's going on!" When they voted to strike again, it wasn't hard for me to decide what to do. I mean, how difficult is it to not show up for work?

Picketing, however, is another story. Picketing implies that not only do you support the cause enough to hold up signs and demonstrate about it, but that you are willing to share your convictions with others. And although I've been deluged with competing propaganda from both the union and the administration ("[Name of Corporation]'s Last Best and Final offer refused to address any of your concerns!" "We're sorry the California Nurses Association values their profits more than you our your patients...") I still find it difficult to filter through all the spin to sort out what the real issues are.

So I told the union rep that while I wouldn't cross the picket lines this weekend, I wouldn't picket for them, either. And I asked if they had some form of e-mailing list for keeping people up to date on what was going on. Receiving official e-mails has been a marked improvement over listening to workplace gossip for sorting out what's going on, but it leaves quite a bit to be desired.

For one thing, I'm getting sick of "solidarity." I think the concept is fantastic, but the word is starting to be just a bit over-used.

And then there's Jim. Jim goes to our church, and is also my uber-manager. I'm not sure what his official title is, but he manages at least three nursing units, one of which I work on. He's several steps above me on the org chart, and I'm reasonably certain that he's been a nurse longer than I've been alive.

He's also single-parenting two toddlers.

While my part in this whole strike and lockout mess has been fairly simple (don't show up for work) Jim has been working eighteen hour days to make sure patient care continues and all goes smoothly for the hospital. (Yet another reason why you couldn't pay me enough to work in nursing administration.)

But the church has really rallied around Jim and his kids. Families from our church have been watching his kids for the last several days. Just to make sure that in the midst of all the strike insanity, Jim has one less thing to worry about.

Union politics be damned--now that's solidarity.

Mini golf and earthquakes and new jobs, oh my!

On Friday, we were asked to go along to the monthly youth group outing. This month's activity was mini golf and arcade games at this place about 45 minutes south of us.

There were about thirty teens there, and I was very grateful that when Kimily co-ordinated rides for people, she made sure that someone picked up Brian and I. Why? Because otherwise the chances for getting lost go up exponentially.

"Go easy on the junior highers!" someone teased me before we started golfing. As if! They completely and utterly toasted my butt. I don't know what my final total score was, but I had several holes that I scored higher than 9 on. Thankfully, the kids didn't harass me too much.

Orientation for my new job started yesterday. The weird thing about pregnancy is that I can't tell if I've just got butterflies in my stomach, or if Shirley is being exceptionally active. As Shirley's main form of entertainment at this point seems to be kicking my kidneys, I was glad she decided to sleep through the majority of orientation. (If your butterflies know judo, it's probably the baby.)

I'm accepting bets for the final number of times I will need to purchase new pants before Shirley arrives in March. I'll keep a running tally on the blog, and the winner will get... something. (Probably sock yarn dyed in colors of their choice.)

I felt all domestic this evening, and made a Dutch apple pie from scratch. And just as I was putting it in the oven, we had a 5.6 earthquake. At first I was fine, because it felt just like when the Air Force jets would break the sound barrier over our house when I was a kid.

When I realized "Oh crap, that's an earthquake!" I got considerably more nervous, especially in light of the 2004 tsunami and the fact that you can see the ocean from our bedroom. But I'm guessing if the house didn't shake enough to knock over my potted plants, I probably don't have to worry about tsunamis too much.