bad luck

Nurses are highly superstitious people. I don't know if this comes from the history of nursing where it was all old wives tales, spiritual, "healing touch" types doing the nursing work, or if it's from the basic nature of bioscience where a lot of things we just don't know the why, the how, or the what, or why some people get very sick for no good reason, and others heal for no good reason.

Maybe it's that "women's intuition" everyone always talks about, the sensitive, caring types mention.

All I know is this morning we walked in under torrents of rain, all of the main roads washed out within hours, there's avalanches, swollen river banks, houses washing away - and we all sad, oh dear, something is going to go terribly wrong today.

One of the first nurses to arrive this morning was wearing her catholic cross, even though she's not really catholic. "I need it today. It protects me."

The second nurse to arrive was saying a prayer that everyone would make it safely.

The third nurse called on the phone saying her car "fell into a pothole". Our boss went to pick her up. It sounds like her car was in something more like a sinkhole rather than a pothole. It's still there.

The fourth nurse never made it work after driving through water that came up to her car-door windows.

And our valiant medical assistant tried 7 different routes to work, was detoured for a 40 minute drive, and eventually made it here.

First patient through the door in the morning had bilateral gangrenous ulcers, missing toes, and then at the last possible minute flatly refused the procedure to open his leg arteries up (iliac, femoral, completely occluded) - and promptly sprinted out the doors. What part of critical limb salvage does not... make... sense? Next time we see him he will not have a leg, perhaps even not his life.

Another patient coded and that didn't end too well but they're alive.

I got written up by the hospital for admitting "an unstable patient" to the general cardiac telly floor, I had to protest the write up and everything, since patient had no symptoms, no chest pain, vital signs normal, everything normal, and it was a standard, standard thing. I won. But now I hate administration.

The other patients were sicker than normal or so it seemed.


I'm giving people rides home in my truck today. We'll see....!