Full House Madness

16th January (Friday) - Oh boy, I came in with a feeling of dread, and I have every right to be. Full house. 19 patients = 4 staff working, Minus the TL and Med Nurse, two of us only. Another girl was supposed to go back but she was asked to do locum so she did. So between three of us we ended up running up and down. Especially with the profs. One after another they kept coming. I didn't had time to write my report when the next person kept on coming. And coming. And coming. And coming. I scrambled all over my reports, rushed patients to OT, chase the billing department for another insurance form for another prof. You name it...
I'm only thankful that most of the patients are nice people, so they didn't give us much trouble. Most of them commented they haven't seen me til up late and I told them that's because I was running after doctors, running to the OT, running to billing, on and off doing errands to cover the poor attendants. We are running short on measuring jugs and bed pan liners and yet we have many patients who are on strict I/O. Urgh. To make matters worse, morning shift left half of the work for us to cover. I prepared a little boy to OT and shoot, no one bothered to pass the medication. I only found out at the last minute when I opened the prof's notes. Gyaaaa. Lucky I quickly pass over to the med nurse and she got the medicine for me. Close call. I know most profs are nice enough people, but cross their bad side by not completing your orders and you're history.
For some weird reason, I followed an anaest and inside, she's fuming. After we got the consent, she started going, "Who gave me the wrong patient during operation? Wasted my time for 30 minutes." What the- There was an incident of wrong patient??? These days I haven't been sending patient down to OT much, but I've been in the morning as well. So no, I haven't heard anything much about wrong patients being sent down. Apparently, hearing from her, it seems that it was our ward who sent down the wrong patient since it was an Obs and Gynae case. And because the wrong patient was sent, everything was delayed for thirty minutes. Yikes. She was basically chucking the prescription form at me. Well, what to do? She's just expressing her feelings. To make matters worse, last minute we got another call from OT saying they need a LMA size 2 and 2.5. I managed to get 2.5, there were plenty, but size 2, crikey, we're out of stock. Urgh. Nothing I can do about it but pass over to the OT that they will have to make use of size 2.5 alone. And because the anaest did not come to see the patient, he didn't know there was a loose teeth on the patient's lower gum. Sigh.
Today seems to be burning hot than usual because I stepped into OT many times and yet my back is sweating. OT is supposed to be freezing like being inside the freezer but we're all sweating, even my patient. His whole head is damp when I came to pick him up. Poor guy. All in all, things were hectic but slowly cooled down after 6.