A Weekend At The Hospital

Here are a few notes I wish to make about my weekend at the hospital.

SATURDAY

• It was a bloody long shift.
  
• My left eye felt sore.
• Oh great! I found that the contact lens in my left eye was torn. (no wonder it was sore)
• Had to remove it....and worked with one good eye = Headache at the end of the day.
• Spent 4 hours searching the entire hospital for a venesection kit. (Mind you, it was the weekend, most depts were closed. So, I phoned one dept to another, before finally, a specialist nurse, who was on-call from home, said she'll come over to the hospital to pass me a few kits).
  
• Acted as a translator. (Just realised that I have not been speaking Chinese for a looonng time...so I had some difficulty finding the correct words to ask the patient).
• Temperatures. Patients in the hospital just loved to get a fever, which gave me more work to do.
  
• 5 mins before I was meant to finish, a patient went into an epileptic fit. sigh.
  

SUNDAY

• Another long day for me. Arrived the next morning for work and found out that there were 13 admissions into my ward (it was meant to be 6 initially), and 2 from the other ward which I was covering.
• WTF?!
  
• A patient "decided" to fall out from her bed....so had to go and make sure she is alright.
  
• Referrals. I was asked by the consultant to refer a few patients to different medical teams.
  
• Noon. Most admissions have arrived, and so, I began to clerk them in.
• *gurling noise from my tummy. Hungry + Stress = :(
• By about 3 pm, I saw only 4 of the admissions. Still have 11 more to see!!! arrghhh!!!!
• A few other things cropped up and needed to be sorted out.
• 6 pm. Saw another 2 more admissions. And another 9 more to go!! And I'm due to be off my shift at 9 pm.
• Sat down for 5 mins to gobble some chocs to increase my depleting energy stores.
• I was nearly on the verge of breaking down....just felt I won't be able to finish them all by tonight. But, I managed to calm myself down and continued my work.
• 9 pm. 5 more patients to see. ("Go sl, you can do this," I whispered to myself).
• One patient was not happy that I saw him so late in the night. Sigh.
• 11 pm. I bumped into my colleague who was covering the wards downstairs. She looked awful and she admitted that she cried earlier on as she has had a rough day.
  
• 11.30 pm. With a few pre-op ECGs that need to be done and chasing results, I decided that I should leave the ward, before I missed the last train home, which was at midnite.
  
• 0015 hours. Arrived at home. Hungry. Headache. Knackered. Dead as a log.
• Could not sleep as the adrenaline was still kicking about in my body. Only managed 3 hours of sleep before I had to get up and leave early for work to complete my unfinished jobs.

hmm....reflecting back on my weekend, I was thinking.....maybe I was being slow in doing the jobs? don't think so...as I think I work quite fast. Maybe I was inefficient? Dunno. All I know is I was so glad that the weekend was over.