Totally not nursing related

but whatever. Found this at www.JustHungry.com, a site I love!

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.


1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue (Duhr. We have a fondue party at least once a year--with cheese, chocolate, and meat/oil)
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush (even though eggplant makes my tongue swell up a little...)
11. Calamari
12. Pho (This is my favorite food. If I could eat only one thing for the rest of my life, it would be Pho.)
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi (I get it in little boil-in-bag packs and eat it for lunch a lot)
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Pistachio ice cream
19. Heirloom tomatoes (has anyone else noticed how much most tomatoes suck these days? I feel like I haven't had a good tomato in years.)
21. Fresh wild berries
22. Foie gras
23. Rice and beans
24. Brawn, or head cheese (Sorry, I just can’t. Though I love a good terrine—a kind of head-to-toe pate type thing.)
25. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper (Uh, I’m not a dumbass.)
26. Dulce de leche
27. Oysters (Gimme gimme gimme oysters raw, fried, in po’boys, loaf, gimme gimme gimme)
28. Baklava
29. Bagna cauda
30. Wasabi peas (rather overrated imho)
31. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl (not in the bowl, as that seems kind of dumb. You can’t butter it!)
32. Salted lassi (Yes. Ew.)
33. Sauerkraut (not a big fan)
34. Root beer float
35. Cognac with a fat cigar (Please, a cigar is not food)
36. Clotted cream tea (I’ve had clotted cream, at teatime, does that count?)
37. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
38. Gumbo (but I pick out the okra)
39. Oxtail
40. Curried goat (I don’t like goat. Tastes too goaty. Bleh.)
41. Whole insects (uh, no, sorry. I will NEVER try a bug.)
42. Phaal
43. Goat’s milk (once again, yuck. Too goaty.)
44. Single malt whisky from a bottle costing $300 or more
45. Fugu
46. Chicken tikka masala
47. Eel
48. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut (whatever…)
49. Sea urchin (custardy yummy sea-flavor goodness…)
50. Prickly pear
51. Umeboshi
52. Abalone
53. Paneer
54. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal (I ALWAYS regret it. ALWAYS.)
55. Spaetzle
56. Dirty gin martini (Bombay Sapphire, very dry, up, with extra olives, please…)
57. Beer above 8% ABV
58. Poutine
59. Carob chips (ugh, but WHY would you ever eat them again?)
60. S’mores
61. Sweetbreads (I think I might have had them, but I can’t be sure, so I left it off…)
62. Kaolin (Nope, not suffering from pica.)
63. Currywurst (I don’t even know what this is. Googled it and found out it’s a sliced German sausage with curry on it. Also the name for a stinky whore.)
64. Durian (nope. Even though we can get it in our neighborhood!)
65. Frogs’ legs
66. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake (uh, what about Zeppole? Come on, who doesn’t like fried dough?)
67. Haggis (oh gosh. Not yet, but I think I might like it. It’s kind of like a hot pate!)
68. Fried plantain
69. Chitterlings, or andouillette (I don't love pig intestines. Can taste WAAAAY too much like pig poop.)
70. Gazpacho
71. Caviar and blini
72. Louche absinthe (nope, but I’ve had tincture of Wormwood, which is similar.)
73. Gjetost, or brunost
74. Roadkill (oh come on!)
75. Baijiu
76. Hostess Fruit Pie
77. Snail
78. Lapsang souchong (why, why would you drink this tea? It’s made with smoked tea leaves and tastes like a burning rubber tire…)
79. Bellini
80. Tom yum
81. Eggs Benedict
82. Pocky (I love Pocky—everything from the pink strawberry kind to “Pocky for Men,” a dark chocolate, toffee kind)
83. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant (yeah, I wish…)
84. Kobe beef
85. Hare
86. Goulash
87. Flowers (Nasturtiums are very nice in a salad)
88. Horse
89. Criollo chocolate
90. Spam
91. Soft shell crab
92. Rose harissa (I’ve had the regular kind, though)
93. Catfish
94. Mole poblano
95. Bagel and lox (are you kidding?!?)
96. Lobster Thermidor
97. Polenta
98. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee (snore…I prefer Sumatra.)
99. Snake

I don't know why the original list is missing the 100th...but 99 is enough! Feel free to participate!

The single DUMBEST Triage Complaint

A young woman in her mid-twenties comes in. Complaint?
I cut the tip of my finger.
On Sunday.
No it's not bleeding.
No, there's no swelling .
No redness. No drainage or ooky stuff either.
It doesn't even really hurt.
Why am I here? Because my friends and coworkers told me I should come to the ER to get it looked at. That you would put something on it to cover it.

I gave her a Band-Aid.

(oh, BTW: her coworkers? All doctors. None of them practice medicine. They're all consultants at some kind of consulting firm.)

Four words

that describe last night's shift to a tee:

Four pounds of poop.

Trying to focus

on the good/funny aspects of my job, since mostly it sucks lately.

Last night I had a mildly demented lady who was brought in by her home health aide for "acting out" aggressively. She was very sweet to me, other than wanting "to get the heck outta here!" She hid her dementia very well--when the doctor asked her who the President was, she looked at him scornfully and said, "Trash!" When asked for his actual name, she said, "I call him TRASH!" and folded her arms on her chest and looked at the wall.

She had sparkly eyes and what appeared to be a dry sense of humor. I went to check up on her and to tell her that the on-call psychiatrist had arrived and would be coming to talk to her shortly.

"Will she let me go home?" the lady asked. I told her I didn't know. "If she doesn't, I'm going to kick her ass!"

I mentioned that kicking the psychiatrist's ass would probably prevent her from getting home at all. She looked at me with a sweet smile and said, "Well then, I guess I'll just KISS her ass instead!"

Morale is Slipping

over at our hospital.

For some reason patient traffic never slowed down after cold and flu season was over. I think we had about a week of quiet days, and then it was right back up to stacking patients up like cordwood and six-hour waits in the waiting room.

We've lost five night-shift nurses and a few day-shift nurses. My shift (11:30-12) is down to four of us (and we need at least six or seven to manage). Management is begging us to do overtime, to sign up with the agency...and are refusing to accommodate schedule requests.

They posted three jobs yesterday. Three. And due to the orientation process, we won't have them working full time for at least three months after they're hired.

It's 12-hour days of just putting your head down and slogging through the messes, filling out protests of assignment for the union (which has heard us and has been sending reps to catalog complaints for upcoming contract negotiations), and dealing with ambulance after ambulance and boarding patients in the ED.

And I got punched in the chest by a drunk las night just as I was ready to walk out the door. GAH!

It's like I never left.

So much for being stress-free after vacation. We're extremely short staffed on nights, so after 8 pm the stress level goes up at work. We go from six areas staffed by six nurses to five, which means some of us have as many as 12 patients at a time (with potential for more if they double you up, which rarely happens, thank goodness).

Wednesday night we were short staffed to start with, and then we got a sick call, so there were four nurses to staff six areas, and it wasn't looking like the night shift would get any dinner breaks. I volunteered to stay until 4 am (a 16-hour shift, the maximum allowed by law) so everyone would get at least a 40-minute break.

I had 12 patients the whole time--including one SICU patient with a broken hip who was confused, tachycardic, and kept pulling off her oxygen and desatting to 85. Fortunately, that was my only monitored bed, so I couldn't be given any more ICU or tele patients. But I had two other patients to prep for surgery (an appendicitis and a confirmed, non-ruptured ectopic pregnancy), a man with a 7 mm kidney stone who was vomiting, shaking and sweating and EXTREMELY needle-phobic (so much so that even after the IV was in, I had to give him Ativan to get him to relax slightly), a 104-year-old man on continuous bladder irrigation who was determined to pull the Foley catheter out, a nice young man with a headache, dizziness, and vomiting who ended up having a brain tumor (yikes), an elderly woman with a DVT on a heparin drip, and an elderly couple who had been struck by a car as they crossed the street. My only saving grace was that I also had three suicidal psych patients (no beds available on the psych ward!) who were all on 1:1 observation, and medically stable so I didn't have to do much for them.

I got home at 5 am and then couldn't sleep for more than a few hours and got up at ten. It was my day off, but I had things to do and sort of stumbled through my chores. I'm off again today, but I feel gypped out of yesterday, since I was so tired. Gah.

I'm Baaaaaack!

...In my sweltering city apartment with our two dogs who are recovering from spending two weeks on a farm with three other dogs, five horses, two geese, a cat, and chickens. They are both snoring in their beds right now.

We're all unpacked, laundry is done, and now we're about to go out for some Vietnamese food. While it was nice to eat junk food and seafood and grilled food and beach snack bar food, I REALLY missed our favorite ethnic restaurants. Maybe tomorrow night we'll hit Chinatown and have some Hong Kong cuisine.

Best of all, I don't have to be back at work until Tuesday. Sigh...