Diary of a Trauma Nurse

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

ICU Nursing - The Price You Pay

Hello everyone. I've been away for awhile with big changes in my life. All for the better! Had a great trip to the river, moved into a beautiful new home with the love of my life and am now back into the ICU routine with dings, beeps, bells, etc. Any of you who work ICU know exactly what I'm talking about........

The subject of my blog today was selected because I woke this afternoon after a nice sleep, rainy afternoon and I decided to catch up on e-mail to my friends. As I sat here in blissful silence, everyone at work or at school, I start to hear it..... ding, ding, ding, ding...... "what the heck?" I listened for awhile to see if it was an alarm, something outside, nope! Walked around the house and the volume never increased. Just the steady ding, ding, ding of a cardiac monitor. Sooo, I just incorporated the rhythm into my thoughts and typed a long overdue friends blog.

So for my family and for my friends, when a nurse's circadian rhythm is screwed up by working 12 hour night shifts and it's 12 hours filled with alarms....., moaning...., alarms...., pt's throwing up on you or pts trying to break your wrist for helping them...., alarms...., screaming (mainly families because the patient's are comatose) and more alarms, and we drag ourselves in in the a.m. after dozing in 75 mph traffic here and there, please don't think we are annoyed at you, or upset with you or anything other than thankful to be home. I can only speak for myself but when I walk in the front door (or crawl, whichever the case may be), my only thoughts are getting the VRE off of me, bleaching the blood out of my scrubs, soaking my very sore wrist or other sore body part, thanking my lucky stars that I woke before I slammed into the back of the Music City Tour Bus going 55 in front of me when I was doing 75 and falling asleep, GETTING some sleep so that I can get up and take care of my family on my 1 or 2 nights off before going back and doing it again. And I'm not unique in that when I come home, I am still thinking about the trauma patient whose life has been shattered by paralysis at such a young age, hoping and praying that the family of the patient who has no chance to live and is suffering horribly will make the decision to remove life support or at the very least make him a DNR and on top of that "hearing" all of the sounds that we live with daily. (ding, ding, ding) So, when we are quiet on the phone, sitting quietly in the bedroom, remember, while we were running, coding, begging doctors to look at our patients or fighting off the head injured patient so we don't have to spend the next 3 months on "light duty" (btw...there is NO such thing in ICU nursing), the normal world was sleeping. So ponder back to your worst day at work when you ran your butt off to no avail, came home, mowed the lawn, worked until bedtime and finally hit the bed exhausted with the dreaded thought of getting up to do it all over again, then multiply that feeling times 10! =) And know that we love you (you're the best kids, parents, husband) and we wouldn't trade our world for anything!!!

May I be a dedicated and caring nurse, Lord.
May my HANDS be competent and soothing.
May my SMILE be sincere and understanding.
May my MANNER be warm and professional.
May my HEART be compassionate and giving.
And
May my SPIRIT be hopeful and uplifing.

And it continues........ (ding) (ding) (ding)

CoryTraumaRN posted today at 3:54 PM

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