#but not because he’s a good teacher. all his ratings are either 1s never take again or 5s changed my life completely

[white-weasel]

Saw College AU but it’s just the Fatal Five working on a group project for Professor Kramer’s introductory level philosophy course

[thenightisland]

unsolicited lengthy updates from the ghost that runs this blog

i couldn’t believe i hadn’t done one of these in 2018 since in 2017 so much was happening that i had to like five or six of them so let’s see what we have here

mm - second in command nurse/one of my best friends, the one who’s always cursed with constantly cheating death and people dying on her etc ch - staff nurse/one of my best friends, human version of pink champagne, pregnant rc - the techs’ version of a charge nurse/one of my best friends cb - the thriller novelist who inexplicably works with us, the one who nearly got killed on the unit last year there are others that’ll come up but i guess those are the main players

2017 was awful right up to the end. about an hour into 2018 things started looking much more promising, mostly from a personal life standpoint. which was the least it could do after 2017 ruined my christmas.

few weeks into the year cb finally came back. he’d been out five months. no one understood why he came back when he had so many other career options at his fingertips, and we certainly didn’t understand why he came back to the shift it happened on. and even more so i didn’t understand why he talked to me about writing, when he wouldn’t even admit he was a writer out loud to anyone else and certainly didn’t talk at length about it with anyone. he still wouldn’t talk about it, to anyone else.

rc nearly put himself into DTs at the beginning of the year, despite, you know, working in psych and knowing what that does to a person. which sometimes i wonder if that was his intention, to do lasting damage, bc that shit can kill you. he got through all of that ofc, and had done really well until these last few weeks, more on /why/ later

our hospital has a weird tendency to create odd romantic relationships that i swear are things forged out of a mash unit type of daily trauma. so mm is currently in a will they or won’t they arc - leaning toward will - with a guy who works up there. one of my med nurses who went 7-3 is most definitely with one of my techs which we all knew would happen. ch is engaged to a social worker who worked at our hospital at the time. our director married a tech. a house sup has a kid with a tech. the detox charge nurse met his wife when she was a tech and they both worked our unit. etc. i guess it’s bc we deal with such intense things every day and you literally do save each other’s lives. we always joke hospital relationships are an inevitability. that being said my situations with rc and cb should have been expected and yet here i am, the former esp, as we’ve been the hospital’s most popular pairing for ages.

i spend a lot of my time now breaking behavior cases rather than treating psych pts. behavior cases are people who aren’t psychotic, they’re just violent opportunistic assholes who have figured out how to go to a psych hospital instead of jail. treating psych pts is tiring but rewarding. breaking behavior cases makes you feel almost sociopathic bc you /do/ you have to break them. psychologically, i mean. physically all we really have to work with is a shot and a few hours in seclusion. so you end up doing these hannibal lecter style speeches and trying to come up with threats that sound convincing that you know you can’t follow through on but you have to make them believe you can. they keep taking these “pts” so i spend 90% of my time now breaking those cases so that they don’t keep hurting staff and my real pts. one such behavior case was responsible for rc getting attacked. it really is a matter of 98% mind games and movie villain speeches, since this large violent not at all psychotic “pt” no longer messes with me or any of my people after our discussion about his behavior. 

my nursing friend who died unexpectedly last year. her sister was bipolar, which i found out in nursing school, bc over easter weekend i helped my friend get her through a psychotic manic break. i didn’t remember her and she didn’t remember me considering the circumstances of our one meeting. so this past spring i’m prepping a pt to transfer to another unit, and it isn’t until then that i realize the sister had been on my unit all week. part of her paperwork said “off meds, having difficulty coping with upcoming anniversary of sister’s sudden death.” it was like seeing a ghost.

my friend’s mother died. we all adored her mom. she was an artist and a very accomplished one. we had to watch what became a ten year decline.

one of my high school teachers died after dealing with cancer for two years and while i wasn’t fond of her and didn’t mourn her, a death is still a death

cb was a night shift weekender, primarily. in march, found out why when i was on 11-7 he’d pick up shifts. and why he started picking up 3-11s when i switched to 3-11. and why he came back to the shift he got hurt on. why he came back at all. why he was finally actually /talking/ to someone about his life and background before he gone girled himself, and why that person was me. took mm pointing all of it out to realize i was the common denominator but i was always bad at math. 

i went to an island in south carolina for a few weeks in april and dreaded coming home since the vacation curse is 4/4. but nothing happened. thank god. i doubt i could have handled a fifth round.

my nursing class had another member die unexpectedly this year too. last year this guy was the one to post in our fb group that my friend/our classmate had died. idk if this is a the ring sort of deal, but now he’s dead, so the girl who posted about /his/ death should probably watch out in 2019. we have an awfully high mortality rate for a class that had like 22 people in it. much like the teacher, i wasn’t esp fond of him, but it is a bit creepy to watch a classmate die each year.

sometime in may is when the hospital started going to hell, i think. i have vague memories of regulatory agencies being around all the time and some of the doctors and assessors literally living there, pt rooms on one of the nicer units converted into bedrooms for them because yes it was that bad. one woman didn’t see her son for two weeks. it kept escalating to a point that our unit was constantly having meetings with the ceo bc things were that fucked up. they were taking behavior cases they should never have taken. there were so many employee injuries in 2018, and we all just kind of revolted when one such behavior case decked a med nurse in the face just bc he could [you know, the person with no psych history who had tried to murder his little sister prior to admission] that pt was supposed to be d/c’d to jail in two weeks. we had him almost two months. the unit looked like a tenement from the boarded up broken windows. we fought and fought and fought for unit safety and the staffing required to accomplish that. everyone was so goddamn exhausted that we started holding admission paperwork hostage like no it’ll get done when you give me the staff to fucking do it but two nurses in this nurses station with 80 volatile pts is not enough, and guess what four techs for that many pts isn’t enough either. i mean it was just every day fighting. i remember sitting on my tailgate drinking tequila one night with ch and us in tears bc our home was falling apart. and the day rc just said i don’t know how much longer i can keep doing this, sounded defeated, which he’s never defeated. there was a night me mm rc and cb just stood in the nurses station exhausted and saying we’ve got to get out of here. but we kept coming back, fighting for every last bit of progress we could. 

i’d been texting cb one weekend while he was at work, which was the only reason i had my phone on me which meant i saw the message from mm that said “what would 30mg of klonopin do to me” which was how i ended up with one of my best friends on my couch on a saturday night sobbing bc she had come close enough to killing herself that she had the already half empty bottle of vodka in one hand and the bottle of pills in the other. so i had to crisis suicide intervention my fellow psych nurse friend. so i guess good thing i was talking to cb about neruda and auden poetry bc i hate to think what would have happened that night if i hadn’t bothered to keep my phone on me like i do a lot.

and then about a month and a half ago it all came to a head. the dangerous understaffing reached its peak. four techs for eighty pts, which meant two techs for /47/ male pts, a unit of behavior cases, four or five pts who were on 1:1 obs, three admissions untouched, six more pending, and me alone in the nurses station bc i had to put my one other nurse /and/ the secretary on 1:1s that i didn’t have coverage for. i told them it wasn’t safe. i told them i was sick of having this argument every week. i told them that the last time i had to go to two techs on that male hall the week before that staff got hurt. well, three of my four techs were guys, who were stuck on the floor in a hold with a male pt and barely able to keep him contained like having to actively fight and i had to be out there for paperwork/supervisory purposes. that left my remaining one hall tech trying to contain the rest of the unit, since the others were stuck on 1:1s which effectively trap you. so an opportunist female behavior case came up from behind and started beating me in the head over and over and dragged me across the floor by my hair, got a lot out too i had hair coming out for /days/. so my one hall tech is trying to pry this bitch off of me and the staff on the 1:1s are dragging their respective pts up there to the middle of it so they could help bc my guys were still in a losing battle with the male pt. from there i remember mostly being in a blind rage and at some point admin et al came to the unit. and i know i yelled at them a lot and told them they’d better be glad i wasn’t handing them my keys and leaving. and our sweet grandma house sup told the ceo and nurse exec they could be house sup the rest of the night bc she was taking me to the er. our director had to be me the rest of the night. rc wouldn’t even /speak/ to her apparently. one of the social workers was telling her boss that if i left then she was leaving. everything was in an uproar. my nurse who had been stuck on the 1:1 was in the nurses station /sobbing/. the female tech told our director “i hope you know we’re staying for karen, not you.” cb was freaking out bc i texted him from the er and then was taken back for a ct and so didn’t answer and he had called ch terrified bc i wasn’t answering [i think the whole thing probably brought back bad memories for him, obv]. rc didn’t sleep for several days bc he was blaming himself and i had to keep telling him /the only way any of this could have been prevented was by them staffing us appropriately/ bc that’s the truth but he was still so fucking miserable and told mm “if this makes her quit they aren’t getting a two weeks notice from me i’m walking out with her”. in the wake of all this, the unit has continued in the same fashion of fighting for basic necessities every day, and mm is struggling running it in my absence with her already fragile mental health. everyone is kind of terrified about something happening to ch since she’s pregnant. mm is having full panic attack rage breakdowns at our director. when they had the admin meeting with everyone else who was there when i got attacked admin asked my team “how could y’all have prevented this” at which point all of them started yelling at them, and then admin wanted to know why no one called a code when i got attacked at which point rc straight up just yelled at the ceo /because there was no one to fucking call it/.  the nurse exec, who always liked me and was one of the few admin people with a conscience, quit in the wake of me getting hurt, because of the whole thing. and rc has been drinking himself to sleep off and on. 

so now we’re at this crossroads, mm ch rc and i. unsure whether to stay or go. and if so, where? our job is like a war zone idk how to be a civilian anymore, but the four of us have been talking like this place is killing us if this job was a boy/girlfriend we’d call this abusive and end it. if the four of us leave that guarantees the total collapse of what little of the unit will be left. it’s already struggling just with /me/ out [i’ve been out because of the head injury which those aren’t fun], let alone the four of us who have always kind of held the unit together. 

so what the hell are we supposed to do?

in theory 2018 didn’t feel as stressful as 2017 but on paper??? on paper it still looks pretty terrible???????????????