ickiness

This week is turning rough on me.

The midnight person has been out yet again.  It seems as if she is gone as much as she is here.  So we afternoon people have to try to cram as much as her twelve hour shift's worth of work into our work shift as possible. So we do not get any breaks, lunch time, etc. And you feel like you've been hit by a truck when you get off work.  And you have to stay over and finish things up and help out the other midnight person. So it really sucks.

Yesterday the high school called really early, asking where Bill was. He has supposed to take the chemistry AP test and he wasn't there, and they were holding off starting the test for him. Well, he had left the house half an hour before that, and should have been there. Then we realized he had probably gone to the church where they have been administering the tests rather than the high school, where they had moved this test to, in an large administrative office in the school administration wing. Bill did not have his cell phone turned on, so Dan drove down to town to find him, but Bill had already realized something was wrong when no one else showed up at the church, and headed to the school. So everything turned out OK, other than me being woken up and having very little sleep by that phone call.

Today I was woken up by the middle school calling. Steven had a hideous cold, could I please come get him and bring him home? So I did that, and then had to run to the grocery store to get cold things for his sore throat. By the time I got home, Bill was home, and he is also sick with the bad cold.  And I think I might be getting it, too, though it is quite possible that my head feels so funny from lack of sleep and my nose is running from allergies.

Some good things:

The patient whose life I supposedly saved is now awake and alert. When I poked my head into his room yesterday to see how he was doing, he looked at me.He has been an impatient sicne April 20, and this was the first time i have seen his eyes open. He is still very sick and still in the ICU, but just being able to pick up his head and look at someone is a good thing at this point. He was improving at a very slow but steady rate, and suddenly in the last couple of days he had been getting a lot better a lot faster.

Being woken up so early yesterday allowed me to watch a couple of movies that I enjoyed (I wastoo tired to concentrate enough to read). Hotel Rwanda was incredibly good, though disturbing due to its genocide subject matter. The violence was fairly muted and implied, rather than being right in your face, which is something I greatly appreciated. I also watched Pride and Prejudice which was enjoyable, though not up to the standards of the BBC mini series from a few years ago.

Today I am too tired to either read or watch a movie. This is one of those days when you go into work and just hope that you're not so tired that you make a bad mistake that could hurt a patient.