My Job & Fort Rucker

I had a blog request (my only comment) to blog about my new job. So, while trying to follow the rules of the ever-glorious yet very necessary HIPPA, I will try my best to walk you through a day in the life of my job.

0445- My alarm goes off. Work is only 20 minutes away but my morning starts early to account for my devotional & breakfast eating.
0640- I arrive at work. Just enough time to walk into the building & clock in before taking the stairs up to the second floor where my unit is located.
0700- After receiving report from my night shift friends, I begin caring for my patients. They have all sorts of stuff going on. In our unit, diagnoses can range from suicide attempt, to surgery gone wrong, to heart issues requiring a cardiac drip but not a cardiologist (because we don't have one), to DKA, to respiratory issues (some requiring ventilators, to older person who had surgery and should just be watched a little more closely.
1100- Blood sugars (because EVERYONE in this world is becoming diabetic)
1300- Lunch (if I'm lucky). This consists of heating up food, sitting down, having 2 bites, being told that a patient needs something, stopping lunch, coming back in 30 minutes to find lunch cold, repeating, eating it anyways.
1700- Realizing that most of the day is gone and that I need to get my report ready for the next shift.
1845- Giving report to the night shift, then continuing the charting that I haven't yet done.
On average, 2000- Leaving work after finishing charting.

My hospital uses paper charting. I was REALLY afraid of it at first. I have learned that it is not all that bad. The problem is that there is a lot of repetition in the paperwork that could be avoided with computer charting. Someone told me a rumor that Medicaid/Medicare was going to start requiring it to be reimbursed. I just researched that rumor & it said that the physician must be switched to EHR (electronic health records) by 2011-2012 to not receive the additional 1% that will be charged if you do not have EHR. Sweet. Maybe it is coming to my hospital.

The wonderful thing that I love a lot about my unit is that the telemetry monitors for the whole hospital are in the ICU. We only have one monitor tech and he works at night, so during the day there is always an ICU RN working the monitors. Therefore, even when I have patients and I feel like I have no clue what I need to do, there is always a nurse I can ask. I love it. It is nice to have someone to ask when you feel lost or can't find something.

Every day I feel like I know more and more about what I need to do for my patients. Each day I realize that I am still learning and that I still have a long ways to go before I know most of what I need to know. And each day I am reminded of the fact that I will never know everything and I thank God for giving me lots of reference people for when I do not know.

I know that several of my blog followers are in nursing school. Do you guys have any questions about my work? I guess you could classify it is a Medical Intensive Care Unit/Step Down Unit. :)

I was just thinking about how long we will be here in Alabama so I decided to add up the weeks to figure it out. Seth begins flight school on 11/29. After he begins, we will have 43.4 weeks of pure training (if he gets Apaches, the air frame he wants. The shortest possibility is 36.4 weeks with the other air frames.) before we will leave here. That means that soonest we could be leaving here is September of next year (if he doesn't get his choice of Apaches). If he gets Apaches, the earliest we could be done here is the middle of October. However, there are a lot of "bubbles" here at Fort Rucker which means that a lot of times they are not ready for a class to move on and so they are put on "hold" for a couple of weeks. So, it is highly doubtful that we will be leaving that early next year.