“So many of the nursing blogs I see are those from very frustrated unhappy nurses.”

(as seen on a thread in nursingvoices.com)

How true do you think this is?

I saw this the other day and I wondered how guilty I am of being one of those frustrated, unhappy nurses. I am one week into my new full time contract. At this point I’m more tired than frustrated. My feet hurt (serves me right for wearing the same pair of Danskos for three years in a row. I think I’m ready for a change – Crocs maybe, or tennis shoes.)

Anyhow, I am sitting here thinking about what to write and the first thing that pops into my head are things that make me unhappy and frustrated. So here is my frustration du jour:

When a patient comes out of a procedure in pain, there are no doctors readily available to write orders and so I feel completely powerless to treat my patient’s pain. By the time the patient comes out, the docs are scrubbed in for the next procedure and so do not answer their pages.

Here are some examples:

Cardiac Catheterizations – These patients must lie flat in bed with their legs held out straight in an uncomfortable stretcher for 4 hours to prevent the risk of bleeding. Many of these patients experience back pain and it would be nice to be able to give them something to treat this. Even just an advil or tylenol might help a little bit.

Chemo Embolizations and Uterine Fibroid Embolizations – Both can be very painful procedures. These patients get a PCA (Patient Controlled Analgesia – “a pain pump” for all you lay readers) with a demand dose of morphine Q 10 minutes. This may sound adequate, but it takes a while to build up in their system. I hate to send them off to the floor without adequate pain relief. I think if each of these patients could start off with a one time 2mg bolus of Morphine, given on an as needed basis, they would be fine but this never seems to happen, and if you page the radiologist to let them know the patient is in pain, they generally don’t seem to answer the page.

I had another patient itching on both of her arms and abdomen and I couldn’t even get her a teeny little dose of benadryl.

AND to top it all off, if a patient does come out of the procedure with some good pain meds ordered, I don’t have access to the pyxis machine (the machine that dispenses the meds) so I have to find another nurse to get the drugs for me. Yesterday I had to stave off a Shirley Maclaine/ Terms of Endearment type situation because a patient had come out of a procedure in pain and most of the other nurses were at lunch.

Being an agency nurse, there’s not much I can do about this. It would be nice if the nursing staff and the doctors did some team building sessions and maybe come up with some solutions to these problems, or at least give us some explanations as to why they don’t write more standing orders. Perhaps the further I get into this contract, things will improve, but for now it’s frustrating. I miss the autonomy of working in the MICU, where there is always a resident around, and there are plenty of protocols and standing orders to keep me covered.

BTW, I totally lifted the RANT idea from problogger.