3 Patients

So today, instead of one patient, I had three. Yes, THREE, bypassing the 2-patient rule from the beginning. I thought I would choke on my coffee, especially when I heard that I was going to have the shyest person from the orthopedics floor group following me for the day to "see what the tele unit is like". Surprisingly, the only part that actually stressed me out was the "being followed" part. I poked my head in and said hi to each patient, to make sure that none of them desperately needed to use the commode or something, then did vital signs for all three, then medications for all three, with assessments fit in between putting the medications in cups, and waiting for my instructor to come and watch me give them.

All three of my patients were interesting in their own ways. One was a not-terribly-old guy, HIV positive, new onset hyperthyroidism, chest pain relieved by nitro, three stents placed, etc. REALLY nice guy. Anemic all his life. Guess how he got HIV? Yeah. That's right. Transfusion in the 80s. How much does THAT suck? But he was awesome. Helped me with all my assessments, wanted to know if he should encourage his kids to go to my school for nursing, LOVED it when I found a way to make coffee for him strong enough to kill the taste of the HIV cocktail.
Did you know that one of the HIV meds looks (and apparently tastes) like yellow paint? I think he's terribly brave to put up with it all (including us).

My second patient was a TINY little 90+ year old woman who looked MAYBE 70. Completely stable, except for that little 5-second PAUSE on her EKG this morning. That she didn't notice. Apparently, since she FELT fine, it's cool, and we didn't need to worry. All she wanted was to be quickly checked over, and we made her DELIRIOUSLY happy when she came out of her bathroom from a shower to find that we'd remade her bed, with proper Nursing School Corners. Yay! I love it when I can make patients happy just by the little things. Actually, my first patient was pretty psyched when HE came back from the bathroom to find everything all pretty too. AND I chased down a doc to get him a scrip for some high-test cough medicine. He had a nasty cough from Pneumocystis pneumonia, and he felt better pretty fast.

My third patient just wanted to sleep, and had a gangrenous foot. Which I never saw, because podietry came round early this morning and REALLY did a BEAUTIFUL job wrapping it. Very nice. We gave him his meds, hung his antibiotics, flushed his PIC line, and voila.

I didn't sleep well last night, so now i'm WIPED OUT. Early bed I think. Like...8 pm early.