Maladies, more maladies, and more maladies! Blood pressures, pulses, and temperatures! Meds, meds, and more meds! And today, nurses who were giving out and prescribing meds were the ones that needed meds! And all the hospital beds are full, so no more maladies please!
Last week there was one day where the hospital room was completely empty. The cleaning ladies cleaned the room and it finally smelled good. That didn’t last long though, as the next day, we got more sick people. Since then, we have been getting people in and the hospital beds have all been full most of the time. We even had to run one expecting mom up to Basis to the hospital there because we were so full that we couldn’t fit any more people in the hospital beds! There was the mom with really bad edema in her legs, then there was the mother of twins who had eclampsia and experienced seizures. There was also the lady that came in this morning with high blood pressure also who could not walk because she was so weak, and there was the guy that came in on a stretcher that needed an iv. And last but not the least, the teenage boy with the infected head is staying at the clinic for a while yet.
For a few of the nurses, the past couple of nights have consisted of going to bed with the alarm set for an hour, then getting up, going to check on people in the hospital room and making sure they took their meds, then finally crawling back into bed for 5 more hours of sleep before they need to be up again and ready for the next clinic day. So you can imagine what it looked like today: nurses with eyelids at half mast trying to keep a cheerful look on their face and a positive attitude even with a flu bug going around. Thankfully, all the people we have in the hospital room now are all stable and not looking too bad so hopefully we won’t lose any more sleep over them during the night.
