Give meds and get a hazmat

Yesterday morning was pretty fantastic.  I was the first one, in my clinical group, picked to give meds.  I was a little nervous due to the fact that my teacher had to look over my shoulder, for educational and legal reasons.  Either way, I was prepared.  We took the basket of medications, in their blister packs, into the patients room and double checked everything with the MAR.  I confidently reached for the first blister pack, which had one Plavix pill left.  I popped the package, aiming it into the medicine cup.  Epic fail!  The pill went flying across the room and onto the floor.  Urgh. Only me, right?  I kept my cool though.  It was only a pill falling onto the floor.  It's not like I killed anyone.  Pills can be replaced, people cannot.  Which is exactly what my teacher and I did after administering the rest of my patient's meds.  All in all, it was a success.

Later on in the day, we sat in a group for our clinical debriefing.  One of the staff members from the clinical facility walked in on our little meeting to inform us that we will not be allowed in the building for the rest of the week due a patient testing positive for the norovirus.  She recommended that we go home, strip down before going inside, immediately put our scrubs into the wash, and boil ourselves in a hot, hot shower.  Fantastic!  I'm praying that I didn't pick up any germs!  I can't afford to get that sick so close to the end of the semester!!  I'm holding my breath and keeping my fingers crossed!

3 Options: Go home, Go home, or Go home.

I'm thankful to not have to work this weekend, however, I have so much school work to do that I don't even know where to begin.  Speaking of work, I got sent home on Thursday.  I was told that my CNA license expired and that I couldn't return to work until I had an active license.  Of course administration waited until a code blue situation to bother me about the whole thing.  I mailed out my paper work, to the red cross, back in September knowing that my license was due to expire near the end of October.  Seeing as the red cross claimed to have never received my paper work, I had been working with an expired license for just shy of a month.  And yes, they waited until a code blue to tell me that I had to go home.  As if I, all of a sudden, didn't know how to help save a life.  I sat down with my manager and was given 3 options:

1. Fill out new paperwork, mail it out again, wait 30 days for my license and of course not be allowed to work in the mean time.
2. Fill out new paperwork, pay an arm and two legs to have it shipped over night.
3. Fill out new paperwork and personally turn it in at the red cross office in Cambridge, MA.

I can't not work for 30 days and I was certainly not about to hand over all of my appendages to pay for over night shipping.  Either way I was being sent home, so I went with the most reasonable option of driving to Cambridge and being able to walk out of the ARC office with proof in hand of my license being reactivated.
Thursday's quote of sarcasm: "Thank you American Red Cross for totally sucking at life and screwing up my day."

Birthday Girl

Yesterday I turned 27. I was told by many to enjoy the day and relax.  It seems that the older we get the more we wish for the simple things in life, such as a day of rest and relaxation.  It would've been absurd for me to wish such silly things.  Instead, I spent the first half of my day at clinical doing a review of my patient's chart.  When I got home, I was able to spend an hour with Tony before he went to work.  After he left, I did some chapter outlining, studied, and took an online exam.  Nothing too exciting nor was my day relaxing.  The best part about it all was when Tony came home from work with a cake for me.

No need for flowers though.  He surprised me with a dozen roses a couple of weeks ago when I burst into tears one morning before work.  The stress of everything had finally built up enough to break me down.  Thankfully I have a husband who refuses to watch me fall to pieces.  He always knows how to put me back together again.



Let there be light.. and heat!

One week later and I'm finally posting again. The deeper and deeper we get into the semester, the less and less time I have to blog.  However, even if I did have time to blog last weekend, I couldn't. Thanks to the lovely, non-med compliant, ridiculously bi-polar mother nature for slapping us with a nasty snow storm, while still in the month of October. We were among many to lose power due to trees being weighed down and falling on power lines. Luckily, I was able to take a hot shower at work Sunday morning and I was rather thankful for having to work a 12 hour shift in a heated building. Meanwhile, Tony was able to get his hands on a generator and my folks let us borrow a small space heater. However, we couldn't leave it running Monday so that we could go to school. The generator would've run out of gas or we feared that someone would steal it.  And I refused to let my dogs stay in the dark or the cold. If I owned 3 huskies it may have been a different story.  I let my teachers know that I was going to be absent and thankfully they understood. And finally, 53 hours after being thrown into the dark, we were turned back on. Our apartment is no longer colder than it is outside.