Buddha is my co-pilot (actually, my preceptor)

I may have mentioned this before, but I have the best preceptor in the whole wide world. She actually has me call her "Buddha", because she is, well, Buddha-shaped. Also jolly. She's been a nurse for 35 years, and she knows pretty much all there is to know about surgical nursing. (She also stands up for me to just about EVERYONE- even the manager, the director of surgical nursing, you name it. She doesn't let ANYONE mess with her "babies"...it's like the OPPOSITE of nurses eating their young.)

Today we had The Patient Assignment From Hell...

Our floor is a pretty high-acuity med-surg floor...primarily Gen Surg (bowel surgeries, esophageal stuff, the occasional weird pancreas thing), Thoracic (chest tubes! And stents! wheee!) and Transplant (kidneys and pancreases only, ifyouplease, unless you had one elsewhere, and are rejecting...). But when Frozen Northlands Teaching Hospital gets busy...we get everything. Urology. Trauma. Orthopedics. WhateverTheFuckThatServiceDoes. We can to 3 kinds of drips, for the most part: Heparin (per protocol, q5hr aPTT draws...huuuuge pain in the neck) Diltiazem (lots and lots and lots of HR checks, and BP checks...like, q1hr or q30min) and...Insulin (q30min finger sticks and rate adjustments. Guess what we had? If you said "ONE OF EACH! PLUS WOUND VACS! AND THE OTHER TWO WERE DIABETIC TOO!!!" you'd be right.

The charge nurse actually APOLOGIZED for putting together the Patient Assignment from Hell, but those were the open beds, because that's who we managed to discharge. I was seriously hyperventilating a few times, even with Buddha at my side, nimbly assessing and cranking drips up and down. While helping me trouble-shoot the 2 blocked JP drains, and the wound vac's low-pressure alarm...

She just says "Easy Tigger (she REFUSES to call me "Alpine")! Take it down to Mach 4! This isn't the ER!" then she smacks me upside the head and tells me to go get coffee before i fall over...

We (I, officially) had a 5 pt. assignment, which is standard.