11th November (Tuesday) - I've been keeping this silent for a moment now, but I think it must've affected me that bad as I thought. It all started off with dressings, of all things. *groans* I get it why one of my colleagues ran off, sometimes you are under-appreciated. I refuse to succumb to that level of depression, well, at least until I gain enough experience and hopefully my book can sell (Which most likely will take a while).
Anyway, back to the track, when I first entered here, I originally did not wear gloves at all when doing dressing, cause that's how I was taught. But when I did my first major dressing, the one with the big drama involving SPC, Redivac and several stitches, Not a fond memory to remember. Okay, today I had to do two dressings. To prevent an incident of running in and out like a headless chicken and giving the patients a bad impression, I went into the patient room and assessed the incision wounds. One is a straight line, a post-CABG wound while the other one is a right lung incision. Okay, simple enough, both are clean and dry, no oozing and pus, the only extra is one person needs the Flavin liquid, the other needs post op-site spray. Okay. While I was doing my first patient, the CI came in in the middle of it and when she saw me wearing sterile gloves, well, she gave me a bullocking for using sterile gloves. Holy... I was so mortified til I kept apologizing to the patient, lucky she was a nice lady otherwise I might have ended up in big trouble, like the patient chasing me out of the room or asking for compensation.
After that, all of us new girls were pulled to the treatment room and we were all given a long lecture about wound types and debating whether we need to use gloves or not. She even went on to say that why would you need to wear gloves during NG and bed-making and emptying the CBD? They are all clean procedures and we should be saving costs for the patients.
!!!!!!
Whoawhoawhoawhoawhoa, hold on a second. NG insertion may be a clean procedure, but you are inserting a tube into the patient, through the NOSE. Oh my Lord, are you telling me you want to touch all of the patient's internal fluids if the NG insertion failed??? And what about emptying CBD, although you are not touching the urine directly, but do you want to risk it? She went on to say that back in her days, there were no gloves and you have to touch body fluids and urine and faeces directly. Sigh... When I was questioned, I answered that the senior taught me to wear gloves because it's like a double protection to prevent infection. When I was a student, when I never wear gloves, I get yelled by my CIs, because what they say is... The patient might be an infectious cases, HIV positive, or Hep B and all that, so isn't it better to wear gloves to protect yourself? Sometimes patients didn't know that they are carrying all these stuff, so better to be safe than sorry. But here, the CI warned if any of us simply uses sterile gloves or latex gloves, she will make us pay for the item out of our own pocket instead of the patient because we are unnecessarily using gloves. Oh... That's nuts. Seriously... If you get infected with those dangerous diseases and get brought into questioning, who is going to get the blame? All fingers will point at you. Sigh. I'll keep her words in mind, but always do the right thing and protect yourself. Because once you get into trouble, no one is going to come and protect you, according to my old CI. Human's nature.
A one hour delay is unforgivable to my next patient, but lucky me again, he's a nice guy. After apologizing to him for the delay, I started cleaning his wound. One thing I always remind myself,always remember to remind my patient to cover their nose once I spray the op-site, because well, it smells really strongly of thick rubber. When I asked my patient, he answered, "Well, yeah, it does kind of smell." No matter, I advised him not to scratch at it and he asked whether I will clean his chest tube wound since it's going to be removed in noon, I said to him, if I clean his wound now, then there'll be no point because then I'll have to double charge, He got my point and then agreed to wait for the prof to remove and clean it. That was a close call.
Most of the patients are all okay, but some, like certain two, are what I labelled as don't talk to them too much type. Because they are both arrogant types that expects you to treat them like queens. Knowing form previous experiences, never talk to these type of patients a lot. Just go in, do your job, ask what is necessary and you'll be safe.
Then I ended up running a lot. How strange. I ran after many doctors/profs that I'm not familiar with, but most of them were okay. Follow their orders and it's all okay. Whew, really tired, and I'm working in the morning again tomorrow. Ahhh.
No comments:
Post a Comment