Bacons

Place: Golden, CO
Weather: Clear, 10” new snow!
Music: Nickel Creek
Mood: Cozy

I got my first paycheck in over a year on Friday and, as my friend Min would say, I’m finally bringing home the bacons. It feels good to have some income, no doubt, but it is hardly my only motivation for getting up in the morning. As with my previous EMT work, I can again say that I am passionate enough about what I do to say that I would do it for free (if I didn’t have so many bills to pay). I wish more people could say that about their jobs, and I feel very lucky to enjoy my work so much. In the last post, I promised I would write a little about nursing… so count this post as the first of many.
I just got a new book, “Emergency Nursing: Principles and Practice,” which defines emergency nursing as “the care of individuals of all ages with perceived or actual physical or emotional alterations of health that are undiagnosed or require further interventions.” During my nursing education, I was fortunate to be placed in many different clinical settings… I worked with sick newborns, kids, adults, and the elderly. I worked in medical, surgical, mental health, OB/GYN, community, and intensive care settings. To me, emergency nursing combines all of these areas into one. You see patients for (usually) very short amounts of time (30 minutes – 5 hours) when they are often very acutely ill or injured. Just to give you an example of the patients I might see coming through the ED in a shift: A 56 year old having a heart attack, a 43 year old schizophrenic patient hearing voices telling him to hurt himself and others, a 23 year old female having severe abdominal pain, a 12 year old who was hit by a car, a 69 year old having a stroke, a 6-week old who stopped breathing, a 36 year old having an anxiety attack, a 85 year old in septic shock, and a 27 year old going through alcohol withdrawal. Then, there are also the sore throats, coughs, and urinary tract infections that should really be getting their healthcare outside of the ED, but that is another story. As a nurse, it is my job to assess, collaborate with physicians and other professionals, plan, intervene to correct whatever ailments our patients arrive with, and evaluate what we have done and how it has affected the patient.
The hospital I’m working at now is a Level III Trauma Center in suburban Denver. Level III (three) means that we are don’t have the specialists in the hospital to treat patients with severe (and I mean SEVERE) traumatic injuries, but we can easily handle minor/stable trauma patient. In contrast, a Level I Trauma Center is ready, 24/7 to immediately handle even the most severe trauma patients, often with very very rapid surgical intervention. Since we are only a Level III, we get the basic stuff… trip and falls, broken hips, broken arms, lacerations, etc. Occasionally a car will drive up and drop a really severely injured person at our door, but all of the ambulances in the city will divert their critical trauma patients to the Level I centers in Denver. With that said, the ED I work in is still the very large (we have 52 beds, compared to 7 in Ripon!) and second-busiest in the state, as far as number of patients seen. And even though we don’t get a lot of trauma, we do see a lot of critically ill people coming in with heart attacks, strokes, and sepsis… along with a lot of people with mental health and substance abuse issues and a fair number of really sick kids.
It has been a huge change of pace and very challenging for me so far, but I’m learning a ton. I have a 5-month long orientation where I will be working directly with another nurse, slowly gaining more and more autonomy. I’ll be working 12-hour shifts with him, usually 11am-11pm (which means I get there at 10:30am and get home by midnight or 12:30am). On top of that, I’ll be getting certified in trauma nursing, advanced cardiac life support, pediatric advanced life support, and another pediatric cert. It’s going to be a rough year, with a lot of growing, some bad days, and some really good ones. I can’t wait to be really comfortable in my new role and not feel like I’m drowning anymore, but I already know that it is not just about the bacons that keep me coming back, I truly love what I do.

-Reed