Sonicrusk Blog

I am the first day into my four straight days of 12-hour shifts, and three days into the six of seven.

I have faced reality and realized that sometimes I have to play the old man and go to bed early. On Tuesday, I was dead tired so I went to bed at 9:30PM. Last night, I stayed up until 11PM just because I wanted to see the end of Law and Order. It was “ripped from the headlines” and very Schiavoesque. Tonight, I’ll probably be in bed before 10PM.

I usually stay up late even if I do work early the next day. I figure I’ll just brave through it. However, you can’t do that with a four-day stretch. Gotta hit the sack like Grandpa with a Ambien.

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Last week, my mom called me, saying that she had visited her longtime storage unit and had retrieved a small bag of my stuff. it was at her place.

I made my way over to her house to pick it up. Small bag was an understatement. It was a time capsule of my life.

There was stuff in there that I thought was long gone. There were name tags from my first few fast-food jobs in the early 1990’s. I had all of my check stubs from when I worked at a local buffet as a teenager. In fact, I had all of my check stubs from before the army.

In basic training, I wrote and received dozens of letters. I used to carry a small yellow legal pad rolled up in one of my numerous BDU pockets. I’d take it out whenever I was sitting around waiting. It beat talking to one of the brainless schmoes in my platoon. You wanna know how basic training is? Go to Costco, and randomly pick out the first 100 people that walk out of the exit. Then spend two months with them. Some will be cool, some older than others, others will be smart and funny, still others will be dumber than doorknobs.

I saved all of the letters I received while training in the Missouri Winter. While home on leave in March, 1997, I put them in the bottom drawer of a dresser located in the guest room of my dad’s house. That was the last time I saw them. How they ended up in my mom’s storage unit for a decade I do not know. Reading them was a trip. Any number of family members and some friends I no longer associate talked about mundane activities back in Bakersfield: the weather, errands, shit talking. Sometimes, certain things would show up in letters from different people. My sister cut school, and my mom, dad, and sister mentioned it in different letters to me. My mom gave my aunt a mattress and had to haul it across town. My grandfather mentioned it in a letter. My aunt did later on. It was crazy reading these letters from such an assortment of people. I thought this correspondence was long gone.

Remember my stamp post where I talked about how I used to ride my bike to the post office in 1989 and buy commemorative stamps? I thought that I had used them all up while at DLI in 1997. That memory was a fallacy, as I now know. I had a few stamps that ended up stuck together that I used in postcards and letters to various family members. The rest of the 25-cent stamps featuring dinosaurs, the Constitution, and steamboats were in this small bag, still in the faded post office envelope given to me back in 1989. There were a lot more than twenty. These stamps are almost heirlooms now; I thought they too were long gone.

Great surprise and small trip down memory lane.

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I’ve always been lucky enough, as far as I can remember, to have jobs that used the standard schedule for the workweek. Even if a place was open and working seven days a week, or even twenty-four hours a day, the workweek still started on Monday morning, and ended the following Sunday night.

Where I work, the schedule starts on Saturday morning and ends on a Friday night. I’ve never understood the rationale for this skewed workweek; why not just use the standard M-Sun?

This can really fuck someone up, especially with the 12-hour shifts and the requirement that everyone work four weekend shifts per month. I work four shifts one week, and three the other for each pay period, making me full time with a little bit of overtime.

The 4-3 is not an exact science and it appears that I am going to get fucked next week, worked into a nub. Starting Monday, I work 6 of 7 days until following Monday, all 12-hour shifts. Four of the days are consecutive. You might think this is an amazing opportunity for overtime. It isn’t. Because of the strange workweek, they are all regular hours that just so happen to be smashed together. I’m going to be a zombie, but at the end of it I get four straight days off. Not much relief, by this time next week I am going to be a grumpy bastard.

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Earlier today, I spent a few minutes writing up a post talking shit about one of my work preceptors and posting it. After reading it, I got to thinking what would happen if co-workers saw it so I marked it as private. The post is still here, just not visible, kind of like a different dimension. Very Twilight Zonish.

I remember Stiltwalker asking why anyone would give a damn to censor him or herself in blogging. I’m very wary to delete a post or even censor myself, but this seemed like a good decision. I might reverse the decision in the near future. Still, I am very tempted to just leave the post standing and tell whomever to fuck off. I guess I’m afraid of having to go to a hostile work environment. I really don’t want my co-workers to know shit about me.

What I could do is give it a password and whoever wants to read it can email me for the password. What’s the email? the two word name of this blog listed in orange above at gmail dot com. Smash those words together.

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I have this orientation at my work that lasts 2-3 months. During this time, I work with an old RN trying to establish good skills. Usually, I work with a filipina lady, nearly 60-years-old, that has been a nurse since the early 70’s. Sounds like a weird combination, but we jive. Whether it is she as my preceptor, or a handful of other people, usually they just let me go out on my own and do things my own way. The important thing is that they get done. Unfortunately, this also means that I have a pattern on how I perform the responsibilities.

I got stuck with this other preceptor yesterday. Not a bad guy, like my primary preceptor, he has been a nurse since the early 1970’s. I had worked on the same shift with him before. Each time, he would observe as he involved himself in some type of controversy du jour. A crusader against injustice or, as he put it, “bad practice.”

I worked with this guy and he does everything ass backwards from me. He was the first nurse I had ever met that arranges the medication sheets, showing what is due and when, from oldest to newest. He saved a photocopy of every single order and every single printed lab results for each patient in the front of each section of the med book under each patient. So when I had to go through finding what meds were due, I had to wade through all of this paper. Time consuming.

He gave me the hospital cell phone to carry, and then would want me to call various people and give them shit for “bad practice.” Some of these people in the other units I actually knew so I had to juggle that prior cordial relationship with this guy pointing at a piece of paper while I’m on the phone wondering why something didn’t get done.

He did little things that irritated me. He wanted me to call the doctor on the hospital cell phone and give some lab results. He made these strange geometric lines across each other and wrote the values in there. I told him I did not know what the hell that meant. He gave me some mumbo-jumbo. Yet again, that had been the first time I had seen such a thing. No other nurse does that.

He would come and look over every little thing I did. When I gave meds, prepared insulin, or drew blood from a patient’s vein for a lab. I felt like a first year student. Being a traveling nurse (ugh!), he fucked up the acuities. To him, everyone was involved in “bad practice:” the doctors, some of the other nurses, the pharmacy, the transferring units. He had me give end-of-shift report but then interrupted the hell out of me. Soon the night nurse just ignored me and took the report from him.

Supposedly, this guy is leaving soon. Good, because I won’t work with him again. I figure I am a good employee, why should I get stuck with shitty preceptors? If they want to fire me, so be it. I don’t know how long the hospital grind is going to work out as it is. Starting next Monday, I have to work 6/7 of the next 12-hour days, including four days in a row. Guess no sleep for me! In case you are thinking, “Big Time Overtime!” think again. It is just an anomaly of a schedule that doesn’t go by a M-F workweek.

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The night after returning from my Vegas Shanghai, my buddies Hoat, Adam, and I enjoyed the sweltering July 3rd night conversing on my front porch. As usual, we talked about a multitude of mundane things: old army stories, dreams (as in the nighttime type), OCD, Vegas itself, and Israel.

Late into the night, past 2 a.m., a strange man suddenly appeared outside my front gate. He jiggled the handle as if to come in. When he was unsuccessful, he called out to us.

“Hey man, you got a light?” he asked. Hoat and I were smoking and honestly, caught off guard. The balls on the strange guy - asking three grown men in a strange neighborhood for a match in the middle of the night. I was speechless.

However, Hoat was not. “Excuse me sir, but this is a private conversation.”

“I got my own cigarettes, I just need a light.”

Holt reiterated. “Sir, this is a private conversation.”

The freak continued. “I know you got a light. I see you smoking”

Just then, the three dogs of the yard rushed up to him barking furiously on the other side of the gate. He stammered a bit in his gait, dismissed the dogs with a furious handshake downward, and walked off into the night.

This got me thinking about how many other weirdos wander around my house at all hours. I knew it happened, because I’ve seen them sauntering past in the bright of day. However, this is the first time I have seen it with my own eyes so brazenly.

Last night, past midnight, I heard the dogs barking again, especially my small dog who never barks at any thing besides a scrawny cat or stray dog in the far distance. I heard rapid fire, freaked out, unusually frenzied barking. I started looking out windows. I saw nothing through the first few. Then I looked out the front window and saw a silhouette, an unwavering shadow standing at the gate, peering over. I thought it was the motherfuckering bogeyman! This guy was standing motionless, staring down at the three barking dogs. So I open my door.

“Howdy!” I say to him.

He says nothing. He apparently had a bike in tow and silently starts pushing it away with him. I closed the front door and walked to the kitchen window and looked out. Just before leaving my view, he jumps on the bike and rides away awkwardly.

So I ask, is there anything more freaky than someone, some strange fucker, standing outside the gate outside your house? What if I didn’t have a gate? Makes me want to take up arms.

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On a side note, I wrote this whole post using voice recognition software and a microphone. Took me a while. Hopefully, I can get the computer/software and me to jive soon. As it is, I’m having to speak like Walter Cronkite to get it to recognize anything I say.

As a nursing student, and then a year spent as a nurse extern, I never really dealt with patients’ families. If they had a concern or question, that was directed to the real nurse, my particular preceptor for that day. I acted as the relay man and only enjoyed pleasant conversation with the family.

I am now the real nurse. My preceptors apparently trust my abilities because they often just throw me out there, hang back, and act as a safety device in case I have a question or start drowning. I deal with families and the patients as the primary go-to person a lot of times. They don’t know that I have only been an RN for a month; all they know is that I have those two letters on my badge and I am the one doing all the nursing stuff to them.

I have been a family member during a loved one’s recovery from surgery. They have always recovered in a glitzy, private room with freshly painted walls and highly buffed floors. The ward I work on – it ain’t that.

Family members are a pain in my ass. If you don’t kick them out of the room during a procedure, they ask you more questions than a nursing professor with a master’s degree. They always think you are going to fuck up their loved one. They want you to drop everything and take care of their patient right now, even though you have four others to juggle in your list of priorities.

Here’s something that really gets my goat. A patient or family member has fifty concerns:

“When is the surgery going to happen?”
“My throat hurts so I can’t eat this food.”
“Why don’t they do this ?”

I ask them if they asked the doctor, or told him/her of their concerns. The usually say they forgot, or “yes.” I try to stress to them that the RN is the middleman between the doctor and patient. If you can’t eat the soft diet, then by telling the doctor, you can get him or her to immediately write an order for some pain relief, or a change in diet type. By telling me after the doc leaves, I now have to track him or her down to get the same thing. You will have a wait. Naturally, most patients remain mum during the doc’s rounds and fawn over everything he or she says. They don’t state their concerns. Also, how the hell am I supposed to know what is going on in the OR? That place runs on its own rules.

Sometimes, and this has nothing to do with family members, patients themselves acts like loopy mutes all day with me. They just stare at me in silence or mumble. Everyone assumes they have “altered mental status.” When the doctor comes in, all of a sudden they are Chatty Cathies. This doesn’t happen often, and when it does I am always outside of the room eavesdropping unexpectedly and it drives me nuts.

It’s expected that the primary concern for any family member is going to be the comfort of his or her particular patient. But questions and subsequent frustration when you don’t know what is going on inside the collective brain of the OR staff or when the doctor will visit again gets old. So do phone calls repeatedly throughout the day asking about a patient’s status. If you are that concerned, gets your ass down to the hospital.

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Five days is a long time between posts for me, but lately I’ve had a hard time with brevity when it comes to this blog. I can talk about my thumbnail and end up yammering for a typed page. I also worked three 12-hour shifts back to back last week and went out of town for a day, the topic of this post

I have been to about fifteen baseball games in my life. At every one of them, I have either rooted for the home team (LA, Anaheim, Boston) or been indifferent to who I wanted to win (Texas, SF, Oakland). I went to San Francisco last night to watch the Dodgers play the Giants. It was the first game I went to in which I was in enemy territory. I’m a Dodger fan.

My buddy Adam lives up there with his girlfriend. When I met him, he already had his Giants cap on. I didn’t put my Dodger cap on right away because I wanted to minimize the potential acrimony. We ate and watched some TV, then hopped on the Muni, an electric rail car.

I entered the Muni with my blue Dodgers cap on and got accosted right away. It wasn’t anything threatening or violent, just some bespectacled man with gray hair wearing a black and orange Giants jacket who started a conversation on the impending game. It was smart alecked, with allusions to how destroyed the Dodgers were going to be as an organization after the series, and how Schmidt was going to trounce the opposition.

Directly inside of AT&T Park, a vendor was handing out placards that simply stated BEAT LA. Giants’ fans really do not like the Dodgers. That is not a fallacy, understatement, or myth. They chanted BEAT LA throughout the game. Giants fans taunted LA fans. At the end of the game, presumably drunken assholes yelled out how much the Dodgers sucked while they walked out of the stadium. They mean business up there.

It didn’t help that the Dodgers played pathetically last night, losing 7-3. The three runs they did score were gifts from the Giant bullpen or sloppy, errant defense. Brad Penny, the Dodgers pitching “ace” gave up a home run to Omar Visquel! The guy only has four home runs this year.

Tonight, as I was driving home, Adam called me on my cell phone. The Dodgers had scored 10 runs by the second inning of tonight’s game. LA ended up winning 14-7.

My luck.

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I got tagged to answer some questions and put them here by my blogging buddy Black Dog.

What were you doing one second ago? Typing the above sentence.

What were you doing one hour ago? Watching 17 News at noon.

What were you doing yesterday? making stew, watching Deadwood, and trying to fix my toilet

What were you doing a month ago? Sitting in a classroom at work going over policies

What were you doing a year ago? Working at a hospital ad nauseum

What were you doing five years ago? Working in an air-conditioned medical records division of a county agency

What were you doing ten years ago? Just started a job at a warehouse. Got the worst case of bronchitis in my life. I think it was pneumonia myself b/c I had to sit up at night to sleep. Still, didn’t call in sick. What a dummy!

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I was off today so I putted around. I watched some Deadwood. While watching Mr. Hearst eat some type of stew in one meal scene, I got a hankering for some. I printed off a recipe on cooks.com and bought what I needed at Albertson’s. Alas, like the Adobo, I couldn’t wait so I ruined my appetite before getting to taste the new dish. It took four hours to cook; I couldn’t make it until 7:30PM. It smelled pretty damn good.

A few days ago, the little ball-bearing chain that connected my toilet’s handle to the plunger inside broke. I couldn’t maneuver the small ball bearing to fit in the clasp with my club hands within the dreadful confines of my toilet’s water tank, so I fashioned two paper clips together to connect the handle level inside the tank with the plunger ring. It worked, but today the contraption broke. I wracked my brain for troubleshooting ideas. I cut off a piece of mop twine and was able to tie it to the handle lever. However, my club hands couldn’t perform the same nimble act with the plunger ring. I eventually said fuck it and put the curved part of a wire coat hanger through the ring. Even this gave me problems as the curved part, the part that actually keeps your coat hung and not on the floor, was too cumbersome for the toilet tank with all of the accessory plumbing going on back there. It didn’t allow the plunger to drop. I had to make a smaller curve out of the curve and slipping it through the ring. Now I have to pull on the coat hanger to flush the can until I can find a new ball-bearing chain or something similar, as well as a more dexterous person whose fingers aren’t made of concrete.

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