So, I thought it was about time for an update. I appear to have last updated about a week ago, which is quite a long time in my world; so yeah. The week at work has been marginally less hellish, whilst staffing’s only been marginally better, the patients have been a bit less dependent, so it’s been more copeable.
It has, however, been a rough few days. An incident occurred at work involving a male doctor who, it appears, thought he could convert me (well, goddess knows what he was thinking, since he’s not got any excuses for his behaviour. He is, however, extremely apologetic). Until I got that resolved, and I have to say I’m impressed with my Matron, Sister and HR department – it was handled incredibly well and exactly the way I wanted, I couldn’t concentrate on work. I’m still a bit wary of going onto the wards where he’s likely to be, but my Matron actually came down with me when I bizarrely needed to (it would be that for the first time in my time working at the hospital, I need to go to this ward a day after the resolution to my complaint).
At any rate, it’s sorted and I’m happy with that. Still in shock it happened at all, but…
Anyway, that turned into frustration a few days later; see there’s a patient with a big wound, a wound that needs VAC therapy – or at least, is likely to benefit from it. I’ve been using VAC since before I was trained – as an HCA I used to help out with VAC wounds at the first hospital I worked at. So almost 5 years of experience with it.
Our tissue viability nurse was angsting slightly about the fact she had the VAC to do on our ward and another dressing on another ward – and not really enough time. But I popped on and did my Whoop of joy, because whilst I love A&E I do also still love wound dressings. And particularly things like Larvae and VAC. They’re terribly exciting in my little world. On discovering that I could dress using VAC she was terribly happy. And I went my merry way, dressing the wound near the middle of the shift. Only I couldn’t get it to work. The machine generates a vacuum, and needs a good seal to the skin; except it kept reporting ‘leak detected’. I spent a good hour fiddling with the dressing – and this is what prompted me to need to go to another ward – where they use VAC a lot.
There’s a dinky little special bung you can put on the tube to check that the VAC pump is working – and we didn’t have one – given that we had the machine and some dressings ‘n that was all. So I hunted high and low, I redressed following some advice from that ward, but I could not get one. I was so frustrated. As far as I could tell the dressing was fine – but I could not get this bung to check. In the end I had to leave it to be redressed with an ordinary dressing…
…but when I went back yesterday I put more effort in and realised there’s another way to check the machine; and it turned out that machine was buggered. Of course, not before I’d redressed her wound, patched it enumerable times for the possible ‘leaks’, and then sat and had a good long think about it. Still, I hope to see it tomorrow, and I suspect that since it’s only Naomi and I who can do VAC dressings, well, it’ll be off – but hopefully now we’ve got a working machine I can do a neater dressing and we can get on with healing that wound.
I realise that’s incredibly dull for most people, but for me the achievement of getting it all on and working – and the hope that she’ll have her wound heading towards healed made me wander round going ‘you may all bow down to me, for I am queen of VAC’ for a bit :-)
The last few days also saw Kathryn down here, visiting. I was phenomenally nervous, I endeavoured to tidy and clean – which is hard, ‘cos my house doesn’t really do Tidy or Clean. I panicked about Brick not starting (he did), I worried about what she’d think of me when she came. In the end, apart from the exhaustion of my job spilling over into my home life (me falling asleep somewhat early :-/ ) and a stair related incident we both seemed to enjoy ourselves a lot. I’m still kinda nervous about things, but I think it’s starting to settle a little.
Here, those of you who’ve done long distance relationships; any advice?
She brought me flowers! My whole lounge smells gorgeous. Anyway, we headed out and I actually discovered nice bits of, well, ‘near’ slough :-) She also continued her endeavours to corrupt me* – with us watching Rent – which was excellent (so long as you’re not averse to musicals). Actually, technically, Happiness of the Katakuris is a musical (along with every other genre of film). She also continued her introduction to the Clumsy Lovers… (currently in my CD player)…
Anyway. I now have my shifts for April. If you want to book me for a day or two, now is your opportunity…
* To be at least slightly fair, I did get this so we could watch it when she came down…
