No, I don't answer the phone at work

The last four days have been pretty long, two days on the floor and two of class. We had the best speakers at class yesterday, one was an NP who is on a thoracic surgery team, and she had these freaking awesome pictures from a camera they insert inside the chest wall after they've deflated one lung to look for cancer and stuff. It was just like a little cave with the ribs on top and a deflated lump of lung on the bottom. Just when I thought it couldn't get any better she started talking about people with esophogeal cancer, and how they have to remove the esophagus completely to prevent recurrence. I thought she was going to talk about some kind of artificial or animal esophogus replacement, but no, they just grab the stomach from the abdomen, and pull it right up into the chest and connect it in your neck! Can you even believe they can do that?!? PS - it is awesome, but trust me you don't want to have to resort to that, so please get your reflux taken care of early!

Then the transplant nurse came. She said that if someone on dialysis gets a kidney transplant, and say the new kidney is rejected and fails, if it lasts for even three days it will add a year onto the persons life expectancy. If it lasts 60 days, it will add five years onto their life expectancy. The average life expectancy for someone on dialysis is 7.5 years, so transplant can make a HUGE difference.

Mostly I've been pretty excited about work, but I have to admit I've been a little overwhelmed this week. It is so much responsibility, and there is so much I still need to learn, and I'm learning so much but there is always more. So yeah, sorry Kyle, but when I turned my cell phone on last night I realized it had been off for four days. Oops. ::grin:: Also, for anyone that ever calls my house phone, the only reason we got that phone was for the alarm system. We never answer it because it is 99% telemarketers. If you do call leave a long enough message that I can run to the phone to answer it if I'm home. But email is always best.

One quick story that made me feel like maybe I'm on the right track, but I went in to see an elderly patient, and he was sleeping. I tried talking with him, because as everyone knows nurses can't possibly allow our patients to ever get uninterrupted sleep, and something seemed off. He woke up enough to answer questions, said he felt fine and was just really sleepy, but my spider sense started tingling nonetheless. So I grabbed a glucometer, and his blood sugar was 33 (that's less than half of normal mom.) A half amp of D50 (sugar water) later he was doing much better. Until he stood up at 6:50pm and peed/pooped all over the floor. ::sigh:: But that is another story. lol

Now I have two days off, and I intend on relaxing a bit. Maybe a nice sweaty jog will be a good thing too.