Hold Everything Lightly #8 {Extension 2802}

I have edited this post for time because it was posted at 9:58 am May 1st but Blogger posted it as 9:58pm April 30. That is why I am sending it out again.

I was attracted to the terrible frantic pace of a teaching hospital because I didn't know any better.
 I liked fast and that hospital seemed fast paced and somehow more thrilling than other hospitals.
 I thought if I could survive there I could work anywhere. That prophetic thought proved right in the end although I never left the University (the prison nursing jobs I had were part of the University system). A teaching hospital is not quiet, patients do not get rest, there are droves of students and doctors and consultants. You cannot turn around without a student asking a question. Each of my patients had four doctors at least. The halls have a hustle and bustle, a noise that hardly subsides until evening. I was hired by a head nurse that I do not remember because she then resigned and I was put in charge. I did not have my registered nursing license yet. Back then you practiced with a graduate license until your board results came in. Here I was in charge of 5 South, telephone extension 2802, a thirty six bed unit usually staffed with two RN's, two LPN's, and four nursing assistants and was a graduate nurse. I had a pulse so it worked for them, I suppose.
I was too green, stupid, and scared to leave or protest.

The labyrinthine halls of the fifth floor took me to a bathroom to the right of the nursing station where I would be sick every morning. Across from the nursing station was a small work room surrounded on three sides by divided windows and we called it the "Birdcage". We sat there, which time rarely allowed, and wrote our nursing notes. The old part of the hospital was where 5 South was located and the patient rooms were too small and four rooms contained four patient beds each which I found reminiscent of the 1950's. It made for lack of privacy and difficulty caring for patients. We also had a few patients on ventilators who had 24 hour nurses at the bedside.  We did peritoneal dialysis for patients with end stage kidney disease. I struggled to care for twelve to fifteen patients and be in charge of the staff and answer the questions of numerous doctors and accept calls from admissions. Code 99's, when the patient is found pulseless and/or in acute respiratory distress, were not infrequent and I became experienced at handling the code cart and CPR (not both at the same time of course). I barely floated in the miasma that was that horrible place.

 I took care of the first AIDS patient diagnosed in our hospital (it was the early 80's). My heart was broken by families of these AIDS patients who often deserted them. We had young leukemia patients that we gave units and units of packed red cells and units of plasma to and often times we lost them. I was so young myself I had not yet built that steely core that protected me from these deaths and each patient loss was crushing for me. One particular patient, Janice, was in her late twenties and was the mother of four young children. Her husband left her when he realized how ill she was with leukemia. Her mother took care of her and the children. She was readmitted to 5 South at Christmas and our nursing staff anonymously gave Christmas gifts to her and her children. Her mother called me a month after her discharge and told me Janice had bled to death in her arms at another hospital.

Three years after I became a  RN I started shaking uncontrollably in the "Birdcage" and could not stop. The patient deaths, the long hours, shift work, and being in charge of the cage were too much and I crashed off the 5 South cliff emotionally. By this time we had a competent and compassionate head nurse and I received the help I needed. I am also thankful for wise and caring doctors who were there at the time. Anyone who was born in the frenetic fires of 5 South were in no place to judge and knew it.  Funny enough my husband (Stephen not Joe), parents, and church did not take my mental instability quite as good.

I do not remember the telephone extension of any other nursing unit I worked on in all these years, at the University, but I shall never forget 5 South's extension 2802.  I had paged interns and residents to that number a squillion times and it is imprinted in my memory. When I am eighty five and have frontal lobe dementia perhaps I will be dialing 2802, 2802, 2802.

♣

"Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts, when God pries your fingers open."

---Corrie Ten Boom 1892-1983

To read posts 1-7 of  Hold Everything Lightly  click on the series at the top of the blog.

thank you for reading
Olive