Today is the second day in a row that I'd woken up just a few minutes before my alarm went off. I hate that. Today is the third day in a row that I forgot to put my watch on. I hate that even more!

Whittling away my last few days at work. I can't say I'll miss this place, though some of the people I might miss. Only some, though.

Doctor: "I need ANYone from ENT, here, stat."
Me: "Okay, I paged the resident in the hospital."
Doctor: "No. Page the on-call."
Me: "...but you said you wanted ANYone, and if the resident could get here quicker --"
Doctor: "No, page the on-call."
Me: ::profanity::
ENT office: "Doctor's office, can you hold, please?"
Me: "No, I'm afraid I can't."
Pause.
ENT office: "Just hold one second please --"
Me: "This is the emergency room, we need a stat page!"
ENT office: "Hold on." ::puts me on hold::

Yesterday I worked four hours of hell alone.

Today I worked 8 hours of hell, thanks to a computer downtime which tripled my work and crippled my ability to accomplish anything.

Friday I will work *12 hours alone*.

Saturday and Sunday I work 12 hours shifts with Incompetent Girl, who makes more work for me by existing than the ER does in any given day.

I am so very, very depressed right now.

What I say:

"You should contact your doctor, or if in your own judgment you think you need to be evaluated for an emergency, then you should come in."

What they hear:

"OMG RUSH IN NOW! NOW NOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOW!"

Now admittedly when I found out I was stuck for 72 hours this week, I expected it to be a bad week. While tigerphoenix is right to say that I did sign up for this, and I did get myself into this mess, I had honestly not envisioned this! I had anticipated one, maybe two, extra shifts a week -- not the equivalent of four!

But I made my bed and I have to lie in it. Okay, I can adjust to that, mentally reconcile that. No, what's worse is that the cold cruel universe can't be happy with my suffering, it has to throw in a loop of its own.

So for the past three days I've been working large chunks of time alone. One girl has called off her last three shifts, and I have been the one picking up the slack at work.

That was NOT something I signed up for!

So here I am starting day 12 of my fifteen day stretch. 40 hours left in my 140 hours without a day off. And I'm just *exhausted*.

One day off on Tuesday (sort of), nine days of work... and then the vice loosens, the hooks disengage, and I can start to breathe again.

And then three weeks later I have to start moving...

This work is kicking my ass -- not so much the work, really, but the juggling of my schedule. I'm working overnights at least once every other week now, often more, so I'm having to push my sleep schedule all around the clock. Wake up at *this* time, no matter how tired I am, so I can be tired enough to sleep that night. Go to bed late, no matter how tired I am, because I need to set my circadian rhythm back so I can function during the night shift. It's really wearying, and what I really need -- a couple days off in a row to rest -- isn't materializing for another, what, eleven days? At least most of my days in this upcoming 11-day stretch of constant work are eight hours, even if they're not exactly scheduled in a less-than-painful way. It's killing my mood and my feelings. I cannot wait till I've completed this move... I only pray I can find a job that allows me to get by without this extra-overtime baloney.

In rereading Rhapsody, I wonder how on earth such an excruciatingly flawed novel not only got published, but recieved critical accolade. It repeatedly fails on suspension of disbelief and plausibility, it's technically mediocre, and the main character should have been named Mary Sue. But I guess that gives me hope that someday I too will be published. I know I'm better, after all. I need to sit down and agent-search more, too... it's a much more difficult feat than I'd anticipated. Ugh, when do I next have the time, though? Stupid work. Oh, I know what I need to do to make it happen -- print out a bunch of Chapter Ones.

My brain is hungry.

(Also, I am hungry for brains, but that's an overwork/sleep dep zombification, thus an unrelated matter.)

My job is not much for mental stimulation, unfortunately. I serve as a passive instrument, without independant function. They ask me for calls, I make calls. They ask me to admit a patient, I admit a patient. Most of these tasks are fairly simple and defined, and experience has allowed me to strip them down to their simplest levels. It's the volume, not the tasks themselves, that oppresses me.

This makes for a lot, and I mean a *lot*, of mental downtime. My brain does not shut off, nor does it handle boredom well. Usually I can feed it with surrepititious doses of Wikipedia, but the sheer number of hours I've been putting in have pushed my brain to the point where all it wants is about eight straight hours alone and a stack of new, good books. And this sort of craving for stimulation makes the day go even slower, which exacerbates the craving, in a vicious circle.

I wish I had a job where I could use my brain.

I assure you, there is absolutely nothing I love more than getting bitched out for following established policy.

Policy for the ER is that we don't give out wait times. We can't. There is no way we can get it right, because at any moment someone could roll in the door in cardiac arrest or something similar. If we estimate low, people scream because they're waiting longer than we "promised." If we estimate high, people scream because we "lied" to "keep them away." So we simply tell them that we are not able to give an estimate. If necessary, we explain WHY and that it is hospital policy.

Makes sense, neh?

But like most things, this was spoiled from the inside by a whiny employee and a nurse who believes whiners instead of those she works with.

I gave the above answer to a nurse who called down wanting to know how busy we were because she'd hurt her foot. She didn't like that answer. She called the nursing supervisor and whined, the nursing supervisor called my charge nurse and bitched, and the charge nurse reamed me out for being "very inappropriate" in my answer on the phone.

Well, let's see. I'm not allowed to give an answer... I'm not allowed to NOT give an answer... that pretty much leaves the option of freezing and going silent whenever the question is asked. Or better yet, give the call to the charge nurse every time the question is asked... which is what said charge nurse actually suggested. Now every charge nurse will suffer because of this one's stupidity and eagerness to believe the worst of the nonclinical staff!

I get mad *and* even. Though to be honest, I'm so stressed out and overworked right now I was briefly close to tears. (I hope this actually provides some small measure of comfort to people I know have felt bad about their own emotional breakdowns at work, recently.)

Today I was the victim of gender discrimination at work.

As pretty much everyone who knows me should know, I have long hair. And Oh Em Gee I am a *guy.*

Now the hospital dress code technically requires that hair longer than the collar must be worn back. Many of the nurses and other employees flout this rule constantly, and observing them getting away with it, I did the same, in expectation of... well, exactly what happened.

True to expectations, of all the people here who ignore the rule, who do the higher-ups in the administration inform my director to talk to about?

Everyone spread the word: UPMC Shadyside discriminates againts its employees based on gender.

It may be trivial, but it isn't a joke.

I just won ten bucks betting on a drunk girl's alcohol level.

Sometimes my job rocks.

If you want to change the policy, change the fucking policy. Don't decide it doesn't work after I do the same thing I always do, change it, and then yell at me for not doing the new thing.

Fucking assholes.

Let's take a moment to talk about courtesy.

When a person works an overnight shift, that means they will be working 8 hours by themselves. They are responsible for every duty that a HUC must do. It is long, rough, and leaves that person tired.

That being the case, the courteous thing to do is allow that HUC to sit at the main desk at the time they come in, where they will be all night. Making whiny excuses and forcing that HUC to sit at the secondary desk, where they have to absorb the responsibility of ripping an extra fifty charts and have to completely log off every active program to move seats at 11pm is th ABSOLUTE HEIGHT of discourtesy.

No policy exists for this. I can't DEMAND that the bitch move. But I'm absolutely sick of being treated like shit by my coworkers. And I'll be damned if I ever give her the courtesy of moving for her, if our situations are reversed.

I hate people so fucking much.

Attention stupid lady:

The hospital is not a restaurant. We have a dietary services that prepare a reasonably wide variety of standardized trays. No matter how much you beg, plead, or demand, we cannot conjure a baked potato for your husband out of thin air. If you truly think we have no idea how to care for a sick person and you can do so much better, why did you bring him here?

Attention stupid people:

The restrictions on visiting (i.e. not before the doctor has seen the patient) is for the protection of their privacy, the quality of their medical care, and the overall safety and comfort of the patient. We won't tell you this, but we're also required to screen for such things as abuse, which logically won't be answered truthfully if the abuser is in the room. If we need your input to care for the patient, or you're nice, we will ask you to come back sooner. Beyond that, you are not special. Your loved one is a patient here, not you, and our policies exist for them, not you. This may shock and astound you, but we have seen patients in states of confusion or dementia before. We have some slight idea of how to take care of them. You also do not get a free pass back just because: you are family; you are loud; you really really want to come back; you have never heard the word 'no' before and are unfamiliar with it; you are crying (though I DO sympathize); you are worried; you threaten me; you throw a tantrum; etc.

Attention stupid people on the phone:

If you want patient information, please call them. The ER is not the operator.

If you have to ask how busy it is, you're not having an emergency.

No, we can't give out medical advice. Yes, that is a law. No, you're not our patient. Yes, you are your doctor's patient. No, not ours. No, yelling won't help. No, this is not an outrage. Yes, this is medically sound. Buh-bye now.

No, we can't give out patient information over the phone -- even if you're his separated conjoined twin calling from Mt. Erebus, Antartica. That's the law. Yes, really.

No. I don't set hospital policy and procedure or federal law. As a corollary, yelling at me won't make them change.

Seriously. If you have to ask if it's busy, you're not sick.

Yes. Seriously.

Attention self:

Stop worrying humanity will redeem itself even slightly in your eyes. So long as you drive on the streets and deal with people at work, it never will.

I woke up this morning after about two hours of sleep in agony from searing stomach pain. After lots of attempts to relieve it, I finally got back to sleep an hour later.

Needless to say I feel like crap today: stomach still upset, head throbbing. I agreed to come in an hour early to work, primarily to save myself grief and retain the preferred main HUC seat rather than the crappy secondary one, only to discover that no only had no one mentioned I would be here an hour early, they'd convinced my coworker that I wasn't coming in at all!

So here I sit at the crappy second HUC desk, reminded once again that it would obscene blasphemy in the face of all creation for anything to go right in my life.

Oh, and speaking of nothing going right:

The second HUC, who was supposed to arrive at 11, showed up late and then disappeared from her desk for another 20 minutes. This delayed my lunch break just long enough for the Assistant Director to pitch my lunch, along with my freakin' tupperware, which I am now going to have to pay out of my own pocket to replace.

I maintain: NOTHING EVER GOES RIGHT.

Of *course* they've left this place a fucked-up mess.

Never mind that they swore blind it'd allllll be up by 6 AM this morning. And they're now five hours behind schedule. This is only to be expected when the people who are in charge of FIXING the problem aren't the ones who suffer from it not being fixed.

I have to say, I like my boss normally, but I lose a lot of respect for her when she refuses to call a spade a spade. If some poor schmuck has his workload tripled or quadrupled by the incompetence of others, that person HAS gotten SCREWED. There isn't a valid counterargument for this point.

Argh. I hate my life.

Apparently at around 8 or so this morning, a sewer beneath Oakland flooded. This in turn caused water to spill into the areas containing a main power line which supplies power to most of Oakland. The power line shorted out, taking out power to a large chunk of the neighborhood, including Presby. Presby, being a hospital, immediately whipped out the backup generators.

They failed.

And so Presby's power died. Along with it, the hospital took out the server farms for every single electronic function in my hospital.

Thus when I came in to work this morning, it was to chaos and despair. No patient tracking systems. No patient registration. No physician order entry. No order entry period. No lab values reporting. No imaging system functionality. No e-mail. No internet.

Now, in a situation like this, who takes it in the shorts? (Hint. The doctors and nurses LOVED it. They like working on paper, the technophobes.)

Today was a nightmare of trying to keep the place functioning, being overworked, writing out every single order, calling hither and thither to try to get anything done, dealing with angry patients... In short, somewhere between triple and quadruple my ordinary workload. For twelve hours straight with only half an hour break.

Worst. Day. Ever.

Tonight is going to be a veeeery rough night at work. The hospital is switching to an electronic records system, and *I* get to be there for the downtime - go-live conversion. It's going to be a mess, absolute chaos and despair!

WHY DID I HAVE TO GET SICK NOW?

Some guy in Medical Records just screamed at me for asking him to do his job.

And I mean that precisely literally. I asked him to perform one of the basic functions of medical records, that of having a patient go through the necessary process to have records released to her. For this, he yelled at me: a literal increase of volume combined with sarcasm, insults, and hostility.

How do people like that keep their jobs? How do they not get shot on the street?

Work has absolutely sucked these last few days. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be on a route to improvement.

I'm exhausted. No wittiness today.