What does a typical day as a nurse look like?

Sometimes people have a distorted idea of what nurses and other staff do at work.

Do you know what we do at work? Can you imagine what we deal with? Read about one of the many days.

 

A typical day at work. I get up at 5:30 in the morning, my feet are still sore from the previous shift, and my stomach is on water, but what can you do? No one else will do my shift for me. I make it to the bathroom, and by the time I leave, barely 20 minutes have passed. I get up as late as possible because I'm grateful for every precious minute of sleep.

When I arrive at the hospital, I look forward to seeing my colleagues. We're like family, we're together all the time, and we've always managed the sometimes almost impossible together.

I look forward to having a quick breakfast with coffee, during the handover of the morning service. Unfortunately, the surprise came right at the door when I saw my dear colleagues being resuscitated. I run to the dressing room to change quickly and fly straight to help. We compressed the chest of the old man, delivered oxygen to the lungs and further to the blood through a tube in the throat connected to the ambuvac, calling out loud the names of the drugs to make it clear who was applying what was ordered. My heart is pounding, I want the gentleman to make it and return to his family. My clumsy hands, shaken by adrenaline, are unable to apply the medicine, so I crouch beside the struggling body and dive in for an indirect cardiac massage. After a few minutes, the doctor pronounces death. He was beyond help. I want to go somewhere quiet in a dark room and mourn the gentleman, but I cannot. We'll get him cleaned up immediately, prepare him for transport, and get the survivors' personal effects in order.

Just as we're finishing up all those difficult tasks together, and about to hand over the service, the emergency room arrives. So we go to the patient, secure him with a monitor for basic vital signs, inform the doctors, and hopefully now we can hand over the remaining patients so that the night service can go home after the now 13-hour shift.

With the slip that CPR and acute admission have brought us, I'm quickly handing out morning medications. Almost every other patient gives me plenty of notice that I'm handing out the meds late, thinking of the deceased patient, but I remain silent with apologetic looks. Breakfast probably won't happen, I'm slowly coming to terms with that. Even with the incessant gnawing in my stomach.

After a round of medications, patient hygiene, and filling up the doctor's office, it dawns on me that it's one o'clock past noon and that I have to go hand out the noon medications to all the patients again, and since my colleague is dealing with a seriously ill person who has no chance to breathe due to the water in her lungs, I automatically pack up her paperwork and hand out the medications for her as well. In doing so, however, I am available to provide her with any help I can and to be a support during a challenging time.

I realize that neither of us has actually had lunch yet, I mean, I haven't even had breakfast. Luckily I can at least manage to drink on the run so I don't wobble. That way I could get into bed next to my patients, which every now and then an older patient would jokingly suggest, I can't avoid.

So even when I did get to eat, which the orderly from the dining room helpfully brought me, I ate for an hour altogether thanks to a lot of work. Over papers, or also with my mouth full to the patient room for the bell, which would certainly have lasted a while, but my conscience would not allow it.

Before I knew it, it was afternoon, and hopefully, some space to write down the start of the day in the documentation. Unfortunately, after the first completed stanza of the patient's day, the first acute admission of the afternoon service appeared. Those patient records need to be comprehensive to record any changes, or to make subsequent changes visible. Such a Shakespearean school.

Once we'd taken care of the admissions, it was time for the evening pills. As a large number of patients changed, we went back and forth to the pharmacy in the exam room for new and refreshed medications. A never-ending story. In between, during visits to the medication rooms, I discovered that a chronic, well-known patient of ours had pulled his cannula out. Unfortunately, it didn't wait for the reason that a very important heart medication was flowing into his vein in certain doses. Not to mention the spilled blood from the puncture. Anyway, the meds have to wait. I'm gonna go inject the cannula. I know it's gonna cause me another slip.

Since I've already practiced cannulas all the way into space even on patients who have very poorly visible and fragile veins, I'm back on the pills in ten minutes. After handing out the patients, I go around again, helping those who won't feed themselves. The sight of food makes my stomach churn.

By the time I finally get around to writing up the paperwork, it's evening and the night shift is already standing impatiently at my desk, waiting for me to finish my work so I can relay what happened throughout the day.

I leave work half an hour after my shift ends. My feet are swollen, my stomach hurts, as does my head, and I feel like I'm probably going to fall asleep while walking. It was a tough day, but we made it through, and we helped a few people with their ailments. I'm expecting the same tomorrow, so I'm going to sleep on it.

 

If you have no idea what a normal day like this looks like, I hope you have a little bit.