Labor Day

So the apartment is finally in order! 3 hours of cleaning and organizing, another hour of getting Teh Interwebs installed, and i've got a place to live again! I am SO happy about it, because it means not inconveniencing someone when i come in late from classes.
The downside is that, as I live alone, and am not terribly close with most of my classmates, and the ones with whom I AM are working...I went this whole weekend mostly without talking at ALL.
I did make about 35 drug cards.

Some interesting nursing observations:
Cardiogenic shock is a very nasty thing to get- it basically means that your heart is no longer pumping in a fashion that lets it get blood into all the rest of your body...or at least not enough to get it into all the fiddling little places like does, noses, etc.

Ventilators: Bubbling in the FIRST chamber means an air leak- either its air coming down the pt.'s throat, through a hole in the lung tissue, and out the chest tube, or the tube has a hole. Check BOTH. If it's the lung, this should stop when the lung heals itself. DO NOT PULL ON THE TUBE.

Stopcocks: They are the DEVIL. Make sure they're closed the way you want them to be closed, or SOME nasty liquid is going to get all over the place. If you're LUCKY it'll only be the foul-smelling enteral nutrition junk. Couldn't they make it smell better? Please? (this one wasn't me...my instructor was so busy telling us how to work a stopcock that she turned it the wrong way)

Codes: hospitals have so MANY kinds of codes now (Pink, Blue, Black, Grey, Red, Yellow, Orange, etc) that NO ONE knows what several of them mean...for instance, apparently orange means "patient surge" which i ASSUME means "we're getting swamped, call for more help for staffing" but COULD mean "omg, somebody got accidentally defibbed!" Code pink means "baby abduction". This means IN ALL SERIOUSNESS that they lock the hospital down, and you're supposed to ask people if you can check their purses for hidden babies. Seriously. Hidden babies. I think there's PROBABLY some leeway in saying "ma'am, i think your purse is too small to hide a baby in"...but you never know.