First patient death and the straight cath

This is an email I sent to my former nursing instructor when I was still on orientation. But I think it accurately shows how the beginning of a nursing career looks...I was still on day shift at the time. Thank goodness I work 7pm to 7am now.

When people say "there's a special place in hell for..." I truly believe I glimpsed that special place for nurses last week. I worked three days. Had three different preceptors. Worked three different units. With three different sets of patients. By report Friday morning, I was nearly in tears. Half of my patients were psyche and nearly all were on contact/droplet/or some other horrible communicable disease precautions. I was gloved and gowned and masked and ungloved and ungowned and unmasked enough times that I am certain there must be a Guinness record in there somewhere. Monday greeted me with the night shift vampires telling us to hurry up with report because they had such a busy night they HAD to get out of there. The horizon looked bleak. Call bells and bed alarms permeated the air with the tell tale stench of C. Diff. It only got worse from there. Wednesday was a gem. Started upstairs but then the moved me downstairs. I was on about an hour and a half and was doing meds post report, post chart checks, post answering call bells despite my desperate attempts to finish assessments when I finally managed to get back into the room with a DNR patient. The night nurse told me she'd gotten a priest to say last rites but the other nurses told me this woman had been predicted to get a visit from the Grim Reaper all week. Therefore, I was not tremendously concerned. But as I was talking to her, I saw a change in breathing pattern. Ah, yes, from somewhat labored to agonal. Then to apnea. Then to...? Okay, time to call in the big dogs. Sarah, the preceptor of the day, came in and we watched the patient take her last breath. After hours of going back and forth with Kidney One, it was decided no organs could be harvested, including her eyes which were large, round, and very much open. By then, thepatient was stiff, mottled, and smelled.Unfortunately for me, I was sent in to do post mortem care with Barbara, a patient care tech who was absolutely creeped out by our contracted, glaring body. I was okay except her tongue was kind of sticking out of her mouth. I had a cat that died once. Her tongue lolled out, too. Attempted to open her jaw to see if I could slip it back in, but rigor mortis had begun to set in. (The patient, not the cat). So I had to wash the patient while Barbara stood by and kept reminding me how much the patient's staring at us creeped her out. I was able to close her eyes with a washcloth. Did I mention we were gloved, gowned, and masked? The room had begun to smell. All of it made us giddy. The rolling of the stiff curled up body back and forth as we wrestled the thin plastic shroud under her. We were laughing so hard I was crying. However, we weren't too disrespectful. I opened the window to let her spirit out, in case it got the idea to attach to oneof us and haunt us. Fly, be free. Just get away from me, I said to myself. I didn't say it out loud to Barbara. She was already threatening to puddle the floor. So us two ninnies wrangled the body into the shroud, and used the ridiculously thin shoelace ties to bind the arms, waist, and feet. I had a terrible time with keeping her head covered. I could not get the wrap to look like the diagram on the bag. So I used critical thinking. Medical tape works wonders. Hey, I'm not being graded anymore. So we finally completed our creepy duty. Or so I thought. I asked Barb if she tied the toe tag on tight enough. "Toe tag?" she said. So our masterpiece was unwrapped and we managed to get the toes apart long enough to slip the tag on. I was sweating. I was tired. And I really didn't want to see any more dead bodies. By this point, I asked her if I could call Transport to take the body to the morgue. I told her we could call down there, "Uh,yes, this is Shannon on 2 West. We need a transport. Could you please send up a stretcher....uh, no, we don't need any oxygen." It could have been so easy.As we laughed our way out of the room, we smacked straight into the nurse manager. Surely, she was not as amused as we were. I said, "it was either we laughed or cried. I still have eight hours here so take your pick." Friday was the "let's ring the call bell simultaneously" day. All four patients on the call bell. Constantly. Three required morphine q hour. I'm new. I'm slow. Ten minutes for each patient to sign it out, draw it up, and log it into the computer before I give it. Three of the four were also bedpan divas. Ten minutes to put them on/take them off/clean them up. I'm sure you can do the math. Not a whole lot of time to look at new orders, give meds on time, and do wound care for 326 who had four areas of staples, two open stomach wounds, two groin puncture wounds, and a fasciotomy on her left calf. And, to boot, a nurse friend of the patient who has terminal cancer decided to ambulate my patient without my knowledge or consent. That call bell was to inform me that my patient had fallen. With a platelet count of 54k. And whom the doctor had just cleared for discharge. Now, the week is funny. But having to do three straigh caths and one foley in one day wasn't funny. Giving an enema to a patient who was fighting me tooth and nail while his mother kept saying "just get it in there and give it!" was not fun. I swear he had the furriest butt I have ever seen. 18 years old, CP, and ornery as heck. Ducolax to another patient who, after I was done, asked me to reglove and try to get it up further in her. My fingers can't get any longer but I tried just to make her feel better.If my family had any idea where my hands have been this past week, they'd never eat dinner again.