Doing My Head In

Trust me, I have nothing against nurses. However, there are times when I wished I could just strangle them. My apologies to anyone who felt hurt by my rants here.

1. "Doctor, this patient's BP is 179/136. It is very high. Pls review her." I looked at her previous blood pressure recordings and they were all normal. I asked her if she has checked it twice or checked in the other arm or tried a different machine. "No" was the reply. I got her to repeat it...and they you go, it was a technical error. Her BP was actually fine.

2. A patient has severely low potassium levels in the body. I asked if they could hook the patient up to a cardiac monitor. Guess what was their reply? "Oh, we can't do that. We do not know how to read the monitor." Now, what kind of an answer is that??? Luckily, the bed manager (who is like their big boss) came along and asked me what's the problem. I told him that this patient is unwell and needed a cardiac monitor. Again, the nurse said the same sentence to the bed manager. He just answered her, "Well, when I come back, I want to see her on the cardiac monitor." Almost immediately, the nurse went to get the monitor.

3. The nurses could never leave me in peace. They kept calling my name nearly every 30 minutes for the most random and minor things, in which, in my humble, they could actually sort it out themselves, except that they were just too lazy to think.

4. "Patient's temperature is 37.5 degrees. What you want me to do?" said one nurse. I looked back at her and noticed that she appeared really clueless. "37.5 is fine," I replied. She said, "You sure? You don't want her to get paracetamol. You don't want blood cultures or anything? err... yes I'm sure and no she doesn't require blood cultures.

Oh, I don't know. It must be the loonng day, or the fact that I wished the nurses could be slightly more competent. And I do not why certain doctors are such a wimp too.

For eg,

"Oh, I feel snuffly today. Don't think I can work till 9 pm tonight. Would you mind covering for me today?"
(to be fair, she wasn't very snuffly. I would personally put up with it and finish up my on-call)

Sigh. Nevermind. I just need to remind myself to SMILE!

Ok...so what if you feel snuffly? If you're on-call, you're on.