In the knowledge of how well my counterparts are coping in the general wards and the emergency department, there is nothing to boast about me taking charge of three patients in the high dependency unit today. It was a fine Sunday morning, and like most Sundays the ward was a little short on staffing, so the charge nurse from the shift before assigned me an extra patient to take care of.
At first it was quite manageable, the cases were relatively simple and I had previous experience in nursing one of the three patients. Moreover the ease of mind in having no need to worry about admitting another patient, alleviated a significant amount of stress throughout my morning shift. So I got over feeling overwhelmed by the fact that there were going to be three patients to whom I had to be responsible for, after taking over the night shift report and getting ready for the next eight hours of daytime, I felt okay as soon as the night staff clocked out. Everything went smoothly enough until the primary team doctors came; the doctors on-call from the night before were busy checking on the patients and their respective charts, before updating their assessments of the patients and drafting out the appropriate plans; then came the senior consultant, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, looking less intimidating on a Sunday morning. He goes to the patients one at a time, discussing the cases with the doctors who were in the ward for over the past twenty-four hours.
I had three patients' plans to follow up with. And one of them was due for an urgent abdominal ultrasound. The good news was that, while preparing that patient for the scan I had time to care for my other two patients, because a doctor and a staff nurse must accompany the patient should he or she needed to be transported out of the ward. In other words, the doctors were busy, thus giving me some spare time to do other things for the other two patients. Cutting a long story short, we transferred the patient down for her scan and came back to the ward, and the day started becoming really busy. No thanks to my lack of experience, it all just never seemed to slow down. I was so caught up with tasks to performed at/before certain specific timings.
Thankfully I managed to do a presentable-enough handover to the afternoon shift nurses. Again, this was nothing to boast about; not especially since the nursing officer on duty discretely said to me, "Joel, it is okay to ask for help" at the end of the shift.
Still, it was a good shift and I look forward to working more meaningful ones. The journey has just begun and I do wish to be living the dream.
