Heh, what a joke, on a day that I should be working my ass off on a A/N shift at the hospital, I’m in a hospital…bed with patient clothes on. Also at a surgical ward, things take a certain familiarity, except I’m now at the receiving end. Being told when to start fasting, being given the standardized speech of waiting for doctors rounds tomorrow, possibly able to discharge, no charging at very convenient bedside plugs as it may blow up the hospital.

Oh and, IV drip sites HURT! Once you see them on 9.9 of 10 patients, they kinda become normalized and when patients complain of it, you brush it off with the necessity bla bla bla, but it does hurt and I guess patients just want acknowledgement of it too, and if it becomes redundant, I shall remove it as soon as possible instead of “playing it safe” and “saving the patient of another jab”. Or at least a balance of it.

And patients do get so damned bored that I start counting my drip rate and watching each plop.

And neighboring patients really do make a difference in sleep quality! Put a whiny ol’ granny on one side and a dementia-cursed granny on the other could drive me crazy. But I wouldn’t know, haha, the privileges of being a HA staff.

But this one old lady wouldn’t stop giving antidepressant advice to another old granny. The talk went on and on. Oddly tho, I think the old granny needed it, needed to be told she’s really much better off than she thinks, and there’s no use being depressive about it. But the bit about tailing off depressants seemed a little scary thing to advise for a layman against professional doctor’s orders.

I’m still in a love-hate relationship with the nitpicky ways of our ward. I guess it’s hard to stick to proper methodology and easy to slip down the slope, and being anally proper at your first work place would help reinforce your learnings. But it’s really bordering on psychotic, I’d never have known until you see how other hospitals and wards operate. Nurses have the right to delegate tasks as they see fit, with proper supervision. And though IV drugs are a nurses prerogative, IV fluids when properly supervised or assessed seems like something that can be delegated, no?