You leave me...Breakless-aahhh!

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If this one is a little dark because it was, in fact, filmed in the dark. I lightened it up a little, but it's terribly grainy. Sorry. This one's more for the audio, anyhow.

It has been sheer hell at work these last several days. For whatever reason, an excess of mid-winter nookie, the astonishing changes in barometric pressure after that thunderstorm this past week, the full moon, and who knows why else, there has been a sharp increase in the baby-havin' at my hospital. That would be fine except that there has been an accompanying sharp decrease in nursing staff. Why? It's Summer. Those who hold a grudge about not getting any Summer Vacation have chosen to abuse their sick time privilages. Folks are cancelling their overtime left and right, and one of our RN's got exposed to the chicken pox and has been determined to be non-immune and has been quarantined. For two weeks. Did administration cover her shifts? No. So on a floor that should be staffed by eight nurses at all times (and really, we're lucky to ever have six anyway) we've been running with four or five. It's stressful. Actually, it's damn near impossible, but somehow we pull it off. I've decided to attempt to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem by forcing myself to show up to work instead of calling out sick because I'm so burnt out...I hate to say it but it's not an easy decision to make.

On the night I filmed this, the five of us managed to help get everyone delivered as safely as possible given the circumstances (every day this week I've come home and kissed my nursing license because no patient has yet suffered from our lack of staff thus lessening my chances of being sued and keeping my malpractice insurance costs nice and low) and the Charge Nurse managed for us all to get breaks--no small feat.

But with a full house, there's noplace to take a break except the nurses' lounge which is across from all the delivery rooms. Not exactly a quiet place to rest, as you'll see. How can you rest with a patient screaming "IhateyouIhateyouIhateyougetitoutgetitoutgetitoutwhywon'tyouHELPME???!!!" over and over combined with the cheerless cheering to "push!" by that night's less-than-stellar resident team?

Please know that although the MD comes into the hall screaming for a nurse to come in the room that I didn't rush to my feet because I knew there already WAS a nurse in the room and that for some reason although there were THREE residents in the patient's room and only ONE nurse those bozos STILL expected THE NURSE to page the attending.

I really don't like that MD team. They just don't mesh well, they don't know how to talk to patients ("No yelling! No yelling!" are you kidding me??) and they treat us like poo.