Sleep-deprived

Monday morning I woke up at 8 am. I forced myself to take a nap from 1-3pm. My night shift started at 7pm. After my shift ended at 7:30am, I went to a four hour class on how to be a good preceptor for new nurses. Basically they took four hours to tell us that in order to be a good preceptor for new nurses we needed to...communicate. (Who would have guessed?) Then, because I'm a total masochist and because the only other time I could go to this other meeting is on the day I want to leave for our vacation to Canada, I went to a staff meeting on a bunch of new initiatives we are starting on our floor. Basically, a bunch of nurses are doing projects because they get a nice bonus for doing so, but in the end it means all of the rest of us have to do a bunch of extra work. Actually, most of the projects are fairly reasonable, making sure we weigh all the patients, finding new ways to prevent falls and pressure ulcers, that sort of thing. Some seem a bit over-the-top in creating busy work, but we'll see what happens with that.

In any case, I worked for 21 hours, and other than the two hour nap I was awake for almost 38 hours. My saving grace was Coke. I never drink soda, I'm just not a big fan, but I was downing them like crazy and wow, does caffeine totally work! I hit a slump at about 9am, but once I passed that I was awake the rest of the day. Even after I got home I didn't go to bed until 9:30. Today I have a bit of a headache, I'm sure related to my caffeine/sugar crash. That stuff is potent.

I had some great patients this weekend. One of them was this super adorable old lady, who would make the perfect poster girl for geriatric nursing. She had this little girl voice and was always happy and talkative and saw the bright side of everything. She had some surgery done, and didn't ask for pain medicine for a long time afterwards. I don't think she was ignoring the pain, I really think she was just so happy she didn't feel any. She was very excited after I told her I was going camping at Acadia in Maine, because she went there 50 years ago and wanted to tell me what hikes to take and where some good restaurants were. I'd totally work in a nursing home if everyone was like her. I wish more people were.

We leave in a week for vacation! So much to do still. Friday I'm taking the car in to get serviced, and I'm wondering how many things they are going to find wrong that they want me to fix. David saw something that said washing and waxing your car can increase fuel efficiency by like 15%, but I'm not sure we're gonna have time for that.

"Escape To Witch Mountain" was on TV, so in my sleepy haze I watched it. That movie is awesome! Disney movies from the 70s aren't as sophisticated as kids movies are today (in fact they are not sophisticated AT ALL) but they had such charm. I looked the movie up on imdb to see if the kids had done anything else after growing up (not much), and I found out they are remaking the movie with that cute girl from "Bridge to Terabithia". So Rhonda and Brenda, maybe your kids will like it.