Work was fairly ho-hum tonight. I had a zillion year old woman that I had to put an ng tube down for tube feeding, and a 50ish year old that had a reaction to a tetanus vaccine a few years back and is now a quad. Anyway, she's ours because she got an overwhelming infection in the nursing home. Fortunately over the course of the last week we were able to save her life using a ton of medications. Yay us. Now she can go back to her fulfulling life of being a bed ornament. Bleah.

On a slightly funnier note, we have a 50ish man who recently had cardiac bypass surgery. Sometimes during surgery, the surgeon deems it necessary to put in pacer wires ... these are wires that are kinda embedded in the heart and come out the chest. If needed, we RN's hook those wires up to a temporary pacemaker after surgery. The pacemaker is a little smaller than a VHS tape, but about that size. Anyway, this guy has been hooked up to one of these since surgery. He's an engineer. One night, a fellow RN went into his room and found him holding the pacemaker fiddling with it, and when he saw my coworker said, "Ya know, I can't for the life of me figure out how this thing works!" We nurses find this sort of thing quite humorous :-) (Tiz okay ... you have to push many buttons simultaneously to get it to work so you can change the programming on it.) Lesson ... if you are in the hospital hooked up to boxes and things, please try not to play with them :-)