Confessions of a Male Nurse by Michael Alexander

Author:Michael Alexander
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Humour
ISBN: 9780007467044
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2012-05-30T07:00:00+00:00

Gotta get out of this place

Mr Benson’s death was the beginning of the end for me. To my colleagues, I was unchanged, but inside I was angry at not being able to do the job to my satisfaction. Things finally came to a head one day when we had a staff shortage.

It was the afternoon shift, and again I had beds 1 to 16. The problem was that the regular nurse assistant had called in sick, and they couldn’t find a replacement. I bluntly refused to work until they found someone to help me. Claire promised to find me an assistant. So I got to work.

Out of 16 beds, 15 had patients in them, one of them a new admission.

Cubicle 1 – Mrs Wright

A confused elderly lady who thought she was in her own house. She thought her husband was still alive, but occasionally had lucid moments. She was complaining about the pain in her legs, and when she pulled back the covers, I was horrified to see two blue legs. They were the most ischaemic (poor blood supply) legs I’d ever seen. The pain must have been incredible. She had an infusion of heparin (to thin the blood) at the bedside, which was empty.

I promised to get her some analgesia, and get a new infusion of heparin.

It took three minutes to get the morphine ready, and another ten minutes to prepare another heparin infusion, but it took a further ten minutes before a nurse was available to come and check my preparations. By the time I eventually administered the morphine and replaced her infusion, Mrs Wright had been suffering for 25 minutes.

Cubicle 2 – Mr Lewis

Mr Lewis was a below knee amputee due to go home the next day, and wouldn’t need much assistance from me. Thank goodness.

Bay 1 – Male six-bedded bay

Bed 1 – A man recovering from bowel surgery and on a liquid only diet.

Bed 2 – A patient recovering from a large gastro-intestinal bleed. He was nil by mouth and on a drip.

Bed 3 – A patient on bed rest because of his leg ulcers, which had been grafted.

Bed 4 – A blocked bowel; nil by mouth, this patient had a tube running up his nose and into his stomach to drain out the contents, and a tube up his penis because the doctor wanted to accurately monitor the fluids going in and out.

Bed 5 – Next to him was a man who was in his second week post a partial resection of the pancreas because of cancer. It was only a matter of time before he died. The longest I had ever seen someone that I was directly involved with live after pancreatic surgery, was six weeks.

Bed 6 – Last, but not least, was a man recovering from a cholecystectomy, or in other words, he had had his gall bladder removed. The surgery is often done using the keyhole technique, but because of complications, in this case he was obese, the surgeon had to do things the old-fashioned way and open him up completely.

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