A is for Assessment

At 0400 I make rounds with my Dynamap machine. It's typically the fourth time I've woken my patients up. Dynamaps cost somewhere in the vicinity of $10,000. They take blood pressure and pulses so I don't have to. I guess it's an efficiency thing. Time is money, and if the hospital can save me time manually taking blood pressures I can spend more time charting on the patients I've barely seen, all in the name of the chief nursing virtue: covering one's ass.

My hands are raw after a weekend of washing them everytime the thought of washing them comes to mind. This is how I save lives.

It's funny that saving lives involves preventing people from touching. Life comes from blessed isolation. Yet, I see it in my patients; they want me to stay. Room 402 had a hip replaced and has no idea what's going on. She wakes up with a look of desperation in her eyes since she can barely tell the difference between the dreams she's waking from and the drugged stupor she awakes into.

404 is a friendly guy. He speaks good English until the conversation gets going and then I realize that I stopped understanding him seconds before unknowingly. Now he looks at me as though he's just said something funny, only I have no idea what we're even talking about any more. I laugh anyway. Weakly.

I finish vitals and return to the nurses station. I feel like I'm at a sixth grade girls sleep over, only I can't leave. Two of the nurses have been doing this long enough to be jaded, but not long enough to have gained any maturity. They act sweet half the time, and then proceed to vomit dirty looks and gossip the rest of the evening.

The nurses here are just as sick as the patients.
At least ethically. Maybe spiritually?
They spend most of the evening being mean to the secretary.

I try to ignore most of their asinine topics of conversation and learn to do this job. I put my initials on random squares to make it appear that I know exactly what's going on with the patients I'm in charge of. I do this again for the sake of covering my ass. That's the name of the game here. I am a pawn in the big corporate machine. Patients are cash cows. We milk them. It's not that my corporation is bad, they only do what they must to maintain the American consumer economy.

I try to start an IV. I don't get it. I pass it off to another nurse who misses twice. Finally on the fourth try our man has an IV . . in a horrible spot, but at least we can continue to pump him full of antibiotics while we chart that we "cared" for him. He looked bored. Really bored. As though what he really needed was conversation and fresh air.

The 4 needles probly cost over $300. Insurance is sure to fight it. We hold onto yellow stickers to make sure the hospital doesn't have to eat the cost.
Why so expensive?
Well cause our government decided it was better to blow up chunks of Iraq than subsidize the production of medical supplies. I earned around $150 dollars tonight. I imagine at least 15 of those dollars are paying for high tech bullets to put Iraqis in hospitals much worse than mine where they will most likely die. I'm working to fund the slow bacterial death of Arabic speaking people everywhere. If my vote counted for much I would give the money to medical companies to make IV's cheaper for Mr. Gomez.

A guy at Starbucks tonight suggested I go be an LVN in Iraq. I could possibly get a six-figure contract, seeing wounds on American soldiers that cost American tax payers multiple tens of thousands to get on them. That's where all the real money's at . . . Hell.

I still want to keep going in nursing. I want to get good at it, cause I feel there's such huge potential for awesome stuff to happen. Yet there's so much wrong with it. The way the system works, we basically prove we care more for the patient's rights than the patient's well-being. It's almost as though the patient is purely a liability to the medical achievement we call "health". . . . And there would be a lot more "health" out there if these stupid patients would quit screwing it up. I wish there was some sort of role that was an inbetween for nurse/minister/counselor. But alas I am confined to forcing health on patients who want so many other things as well. Sure they want health, after they get some help with finances and receive a general impression that there are people who give a damn about them. And I don't think that's too much to ask, only the American medical system isn't well suited to providing those things. And, sure, it's not like it's only the system's fault. The system is only the way it is because our government would rather corporatize Hell, and open up franchises in all the Arabic-speaking countries.

And I guess since we are the government we have no one to blame but ourselves.

I am reenacting Plato's cave. I've been outside, and the shadows aren't real. But the majority likes the shadows, they're entertaining, even during commercial breaks. So, leave the TV on. Vote pro-Hell. I'll go forcefeed people some of this stuff we call "health".