My last day of work was Friday.  I worked Thursday and Friday this past week and on Thursday, they had a potluck luncheon for me which was lovely.  Last weekend the MRI manager and his wife had bought me a gift certificate for Michael's and I remembered a video I had seen of young women at a bridal shower, painting their arms with fabric paint and then hugging the bride to be who was wearing a white shirt.  I thought this was a wonderful idea and bought paint and a t-shirt with the gift certificate.

The first thing one of my young nurses did, was paint a pair of droopy boobs on the t-shirt, complete with nipples.  People signed the shirt and left messages for me on it and near the end of the day, I went around asking people if they wanted to give me a hug.  One of the young nurses, asked if she could put her handprints on the boobs.  Of course I said and so she did.  The afternoon was lovely and I got to say goodbye to people and get lots of hugs. 

Friday was my actual last day, usually a day spent swanning around and chatting with people.  I was the only regular staff on, everybody else was casual.  Usually a CT tech comes out to help us with IVs but they were short staffed so had nobody to spare.  The first problem, a patient whose chart said she'd had a severe allergic (skin peeling off severe) to CT dye (she wasn't, the nurse who charted that made a mistake) and that took half an hour to sort out but I did learn how to look back at the nursing notes made while the patient was in the RAH. 

The next problem was kidney function tests.  Normally we do our own creatinine tests but there is a shortage of the cartridges needed to do this, so we had to draw our own blood, order the tests, print the correct labels and take it down to the lab and none of us really knew how to do that.  That took almost an hour to sort out, plus grumpy, frustrated nurses. 

The next problem was a patient with a strange mark in the middle of her port (implanted vascular access device) that shouldn't have been there.  We had a rad, reluctantly, come to look at, who then wanted a systemic (chemo) nurse to take a look at it.  It wasn't infected, yet, but it wasn't right either.  The decision was made to start an IV instead and the patient informed me she had no veins.  And the poor patient thought she was going to die because of the port problem.  I reassured her while I heated up her arm, nothing catastrophic was going to happen until we could decided properly what do to with her port.  Fortunately, I got a very tiny IV in first time and she was able to have her CT scan without incident.

By the end of all of this, I was late for my break by an hour and half.  I don't do well without food but I held it together, although I did end up crying on my break.  What a shitty last day.  It didn't get much better and we ran our asses off until a regular staff came in at 1pm to cover the last half of the day.  She was surprised to see me and told me to go home, which I finally did.  Wasn't a great day and reinforced my decision to retire.

And then yesterday we took Jack to Brick Fest Live, an overpriced lego thing which Jack thoroughly enjoyed.

This morning the sun is shining and the cat wants to go out and then come in and then go out and then come in.  I've put my sheets on the line to dry and I'm going to take Miss Katie out shortly.

Unless you're a nurse.