17th December (Wednesday) - Oh sweet Lord, I came back from my day off to find mayhem in the ward. Everyone is yelling at each other, professors are shouting and demanding, patients awaiting admissions are screaming for rooms.... And yes, it's a full house.
Taking report is impossible. In between our report, someone is often disturbing us, either a phone call, profs barging in, staff nurses yelling for updates and such. I missed out on half of the diagnosis because all of the patients are new, with only 3 to 4 of our regular patients left. Luckily, they are straightforward cases, because even the care seems half-filled in, and the girl was passing at lightning speed, not even bothered that we are struggling to catch up with her. Half dazed, what can we do but shuffle over ready to take over?
Of course everything is hectic. What is even more crazy than having a full house, with patients from admission keep marching up to our counter and demanding us that they want rooms. Sigh, don't they understand the meaning of the word FULL HOUSE? They keep telling us, "But I came here early..." "I already booked a room in advance, so how can it still be occupied?" "The front counter said there's a discharge, so why is the patient still there???" They honestly must've never read their green sheet. "Room availability is subjected to the number of vacancy. It does not necessarily means that it's a first come first serve basis" in bold capitals. As mentioned before many times, we can't chase patients out of the room. They have the right to remain in their room until the bill is fully settled.
Then there's the mad rush all over for all sorts of procedures. And doctors are making some big issues. An Emergency Medicine doctor who kept wanting to use the ultrasound machine to scan his patient's knee????? Erm, HELLO???
Then there's a huge issue of stolen cash. A patient who had came in from ER last night had his money stolen. The dilemma : Nobody bothered to check his wallet until our shift, about 3 pm, when he checked his wallet and announced that his money had been stolen. Wonderful, the whole family were in an uproar, but at least they didn't hurl verbal abuse and physical violence at us, but they behaved in a civilized manner, which make us willing to help them more, by getting the security guard to help them. I hope the issue is resolved soon.
With the amount of cancer and kids case coming in like tsunami, all our stress are hitting the roof. And it did not help with all of the Chinese patients chasing me for their demands. For God's sake, I got 5 reports to write, follow the doctor's rounds, attend call bells from the same patient over and over again cause no one bothered to. Go and find the other nurses, please, let me do my work in peace before I explode. God knows since I got many half-finished reports that I rushed at 8 pm, with me taking my dinner at 8.30. Crazy. D:
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