April is always disappointing

April is a deceptive month. I always think, "hey, the weather is beautiful, it's lovely outside, Easter is over--things should calm down in here soon."

Nah.

I think this every year, and every year, without fail, I am disappointed. We are always packed to the rafters seven days a week, with ambulances coming nonstop. Yesterday was the first day the waiting room wasn't stuffed to the gills.

But I got to be a "real" nurse the last couple of days. I educated a family about the last stages of death so they could be present with their mother calmly, holding her hand lovingly through the last hour of her life. I reassured an exhausted single mom with a (possibly) seizing child. I put in two difficult Foley catheters: one in an elderly woman who had broken AND dislocated her hip at the gym (no, she didn't break it while working out, she broke it twisting to open the door for someone!) and a 13-year-old with spina bifida and hypospadias who had a bad UTI with urinary retention. Got them both in on the first shot (and I inserted the elderly woman's Foley from behind! HAH!).

I also had to put up with the MOST unpleasant, most annoying nurse in the world, a real "C-U-Next Tuesday," as our pediatric attending would say. She begs for help and then criticizes the way you do it. She makes up rules about the way the ER works as she goes. She's mean to the techs, the clerks, the residents. She's slow and fixates on procedure and paperwork instead of actually helping patients or jumping in during a crisis. She makes me want to hang myself. The only way I can get through a day working with her (because I'm often assigned to float, and when she's there, she bitches until I float to help her--exclusively. With her three patients, while everyone else has twelve) is to remember that people who enjoy making others miserable are often miserable themselves, and that NO ONE in the ER even likes her a tiny bit, and how that must suck.