| Storms, a Man with Gold Shoes, and Nursing It was one of those days when everything that could go wrong did. I was working the evening shift on a surgical floor and had to be out of the house by two o'clock to get there. The baby-sitter was late so, I arrived late for work. The RN that was our usual charge nurse had called in sick, so I was proclaimed Charge Nurse by the Supervisor who was rushing to leave when I arrived. I had missed most of the report on our floor full of newly post operative patients. I was behind already and just prayed that our new RN had listened carefully and knew what she was doing. I was short a nurse so I took a couple of extra patients. I started my rounds to check my ten patients just to get interrupted by the new RN. She had an elderly patient that was crying hysterically because she thought there was a man "under her bed". Not just any man but he had on "gold pointed slippers and was after her money". I went into the room and looked under the bed to assure her that no one was there. She didn't believe me and refused to look again for herself. So we put her in a chair in the hall and she sat there crying grasping her coin purse. Of course, all the other patients were upset by this so I had to try to explain it. I put a call into her doctor and his answer was she is "senile", and then ordered a tranquilizer which didn't have any effect on her. The physicians were coming to make their "after office hour" hospital visits. Their patients were complaining about the little old lady sobbing in the hall. Some of our older doctors wanted a nurse to hold their stacks of metal charts and follow them around, like hand maidens. We had one doctor that wanted a particular nurse for this, so she dropped whatever she was doing and went with him. Gloria was her name and she was a wonderful friend in and out of work and we gave her a hard time about this doctor anyway. She was fun to tease because she would turn beet red whenever we kidded with her. It was beginning to rain outside. In Atlanta in April usually this meant thunderstorms and sometimes tornado weather. I knew Gloria was terrified of storms. All of a sudden a clap of thunder jolted the floor, the lights went out and a sudden crash came from the end of the hall. All the metal charts Gloria had been carrying were all over the floor and she was crying. The charts had come apart, information for 10 patients was all over the floor that had to separated and put back together. So, I had both Gloria crying and the little lady with the "man with the gold slippers" sobbing. The generator kicked in so the lights were out for only a few minutes. But it was a haunted hospital corridor for about 5 long minutes, and I was becoming the Wicked Witch of the South. Then the tornado warning drill went off so we had to get all our ambulatory (the ones that could walk with help) patients out in the hallways, and pull the ones in beds away from windows and cover them with pillows and blankets. This is a job when you have 40 patients with various tubes and IV poles, which are frightened because of the weather on top of their surgeries. Of course at that point they all wanted pain injections. We were too busy to be frightened, even Gloria got busy and rock and rolled with the rest of us. There actually was a tornado that came through but it didn't damage the hospital. By the time it was cleared we got all these patients back into bed, except the lady with her purse, it was about 8 PM. The dinner trays hadn't been served, the five, six and seven o'clock medicines hadn't been given. I was ready to pull my hair out. About the time I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, the night shift people started calling to say their power was out and they had storm damage so I knew that I would be working a double shift along with whoever else I could talk into staying. The night never got any better, we had to send a patient back to surgery that started bleeding and another one had chest pain and I had to beg a cardiologist to come, looking at her EKG she had a mild heart attack during the excitement. So we transferred her to Coronary Intensive Care. It never stopped all night. I think I ate a packet of crackers and drank some soup in sixteen hours. We were so glad to see the day shift get there and they were appalled at the work we had left for them to do. How dare they? I was so tired. I crawled into an empty bed we had, it was a storage room with desks and office supplies in it. I did my charting on the conditions of the patients in there so I had some peace and quiet. I think I finally went home at 10am and then turned around and came back in and worked that afternoon. We never did find the man with the gold shoes. I think he was causing all the trouble in the first place. Next time I will have to tell you about the night we had an ice storm and my husband was stuck downtown, was talking to me on a pay phone as he watched his new truck get slammed into and I pulled a triple shift that time. But that is yet another story. By Kathie Stehr October 10, 2002 Short story on Thunder |
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