Friday, June 29th 6:13 PM
So I’ve been at work for three weeks now and it’s high time that I told you three about it. My typical day goes like this:
I show up in the morning a few minutes early and clock-in in the nurses’ changing room. I have yet to see a nurse changing in there, thank god (all the nurses are 40s and 50s, which makes them considerably younger than the patients). I walk into work-proper and get the x-ray-chart requests that came in the early morning. I find them as quickly as I can, marking the ones I don’t find. Then I get ready and go do ‘rounds.’
You’d think at a hospital that ‘rounds’ would be something interesting. In fact, this is not a real hospital and rounds are only me with a wheely-thing moving paper around. I drop off x-ray charts in radiology, then head up to Behavioral Health. I try not to stare at the butt of the behavioral health nurse (she wears these skirts…you’d have to see it) while she bends over to get charts for me. If it’s a Wednesday, I take their stuff to be shredded (any paper with patient info on it must be shredded). Then I go to the ER to do the same thing. Then I dodge the old, lost people in wheelchairs and ignore the constant sounds of cockatiels chirping and “emergency”¹ beeps from the old-folks’ rooms as I return to Cornelia’s Cave.
After this, I check the schedules for the OR and pull any charts they need.
Finally I get to start my real job, which is prepping, scanning, and indexing ER chards and Behavioral Health charts for the internet database. (no, you cannot access it) Sometime around then, I start getting angry and frantic calls from Radiology or Pre-Op in the other hospital (Lansdowne) asking for this or that x-ray or fax sheet. Sometimes I just never received it, other times I’ve forgotten it, and on one memorable occasion, they had lost it and I had misplaced it so we were both screwed up.
Around noon, I go and eat lunch alone. I leave lunch 15 minutes early so I can check my mail and facebook. Please e-mail me because work is very boring.
I finish scanning and indexing charts at around 3:30. I re-file the x-ray charts that had been borrowed previously, then I sit around for half an hour having done everything there is to do and trying not to fall asleep.
I clock out. I walk out. I raise my arms in the air like a marathon runner crossing the finish line. I get into a very hot car and drive home, where I get online and try not to fall asleep before dinner.
The end.
Love and kisses,
Andrew1 The aged residents of Nursing and Rehabilitation often put on their "it's-an-emergency-I-may-be-dying-alarms" whenever they need someone to, say, turn on the fan in their room or change the channel on their tv. Consequently the nurses just ignore the emergency alarms and they therefore ring all day long. Frustrating. The aged-folk probably can't even hear the high pitches anyway, so probably have no idea how annoying they're being.