Rescue Journal

don't bother reading this..i am just blowing my top.

Carol · Jun 10, 2011

i am in a bad mood today...
i am pissed cuz i am back to square one with my bad knee and minus the meds that were working cuz my blood pressure shot up from them. chronic pain is frustrating..it is geared to put a damper on any remotely happy.
and i am pissed cuz i am having to hoop jump again and pointless hoop jumping just makes me mad. i will jump for the animals here and i will jump for my human patients too but they are asking for the jumps cuz they either really do need them or innocently, they just think they really do. i rushed out at the end of my shift today, to see a client at the very end of the day simply because they were worried about something and all they needed was for someone to say everything was really ok. when you are sick or injured, peace of mind can be a really big deal.
.

but i have no patience for stupid busy body shit that has no purpose except to make someone jump because you can. today we got a sheet at work from mid management, whose distance from real live patients is 1000 endless and boring meetings and a million bright and time consuming paper pushing ideas... that now tells us how much time we can allow for each nursing task..simple dressings are given XX number of minutes, complex ones are given xxx number of minutes..are you freaking kidding me? you want me to carry a stop watch and TIME my direct patient care??? apparently it is perfectly fine to load us down with hours and hours of not timed paperwork, but god forbid changing a dressing isn't allotted a specific amount of time.

and i hate bean counting..i honestly do not give a shit what medical care costs. i don't care if someone is aboriginal or has an aquired brain injury and has another cost center code..it is not my area..all i care about is they get the care that they need to find wellbeing and health again if they can..let someone else who is not a nurse or a doctor spend their day counting beans...we were trained to do other things that the bean counters can't do.

and the same thing happens here at saints sometimes too when absolute bullshit just overwhelms you. there are so many ways that the animals get lost in the human hoopalot world..and the hoops are just round skinny tubes leading to endless black holes that go nowhere, do nothing except waste more precious time.

we skimp on the important things that actually take a body, a brain, two hands and a heart and we squish it all down on to sheets of paper to say what we mean, but we can't actually do, cuz we can't find our way out of the freaking gynormous useless paper igloo!

ok carol...take a deep breath...i am home, the doors are all closed against the outer world bullshit, that life is locked out for the night.

and now for the real stuff...

i picked up daisy on my way home from work..interesting xrays today. she not only has a blown C3 disc..but we also accidently found a huge bladder stone on her xrays. sigh..so when she goes in for her mammary tumor removal and for her badly needed dental surgery..i guess we will take out the bladder stone at the same time...she will get three big benefits from one day of surgery. anyway..she could walk again when she got home...it is intermittent spinal compression that messes her up once in awhile.

that hag sweetie pie jumped daphne earlier again today...AND she dared to try to jump bambi1 when i got home and was letting them out....no one touches my favorite fat walrus dog! she was not too happy to find herself lifted upside down by her tail as i pulled her off of bambi and told her to knock it off right now!

sweetie says..."holy shit batman..she has me upside down by the tail!!!! is that even allowed????"
yes it is dear..it doesn't hurt, it gets your attention, and it stops the fight cuz ain't no dog fighting happening while you are high up in the air.

while i think of it..do you know why JRT's tails historically are docked the length they are?..because they were a perfect handgrip length for grabbing dogs by the tails and moving them up and down off the backs of the horses during the hunts and for pulling them back out of badger holes.
sweetie pie just learned that interesting fact today..even tho her tail was never docked and she has probably never been up on a horse or down a badger hole...her tail does apparently have similar uses now.

sigh..ok..i am done with all of angst for now..the whole sweetie pie hag thing has cheered me up greatly..i so like shocking the crap out of bitchy and bully little dogs... the shocked horror-filled look on her face was pretty funny...i just wish jerry had a tail so i could do it to him when he needed it once in a while too...sadly someone cropped his tail far too short..it wouldn't be safe to lift him..i might drop him on his head by mistake.

and phoebe has no useful grabbing tail at all..just this stupid and useless nub that looks like a nose.

and by the way if you don't know this..the only safe way to grab a dog in a fight and pull them off is by the tail...DO NOT EVER TRY TO GRAP THEM BY THE COLLAR...YOU WILL GET BITTEN.
grab the tail near the base, hold tight and move back while pulling them off...it is not mean, you won't hurt them and you won't get hurt as easily either...and if they are little like sweetie, you can just lift them high up into the air!

Comments

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Nancy

Thanks Mark, for the info on fighting dogs, and pulling their back legs. It makes sense and in all the commotion of a pit bull attack may be faster than trying to find the base of it's tail.

Hopefully I don't see another attack anytime soon, but I feel better knowing a couple ways now to separate fighting or attacking dogs.

Mark

to separate fighting dogs without tails grab them by the back legs and pull, they will let go of the other dog as their movement is restricted. This works as I have done it before, it saves you getting bitten accidentally as grabbing by the collar would.

Health care in the UK is just the same,hire bean counters and fire nurses to "save" money. i would like to see bean counters change infected dressings or clean up poop.

Liana

Carol, sorry you had a bad day....but I must admit when you decide to post a good rant you just crack me up.....hope your day amproves.

Bunny Horne

Carol and all hands-on medical professionals I so empathize with your plight. Sadly it is not just BC, my wee frail 56 year old sister in ONT was in distress, the ambulance that was en route to the hospital where her doctor had privileges was turned away because her vital signs were too low. TOO LOW, where are you supposed to go - directly to the morgue - do not pass go, do not collect $200? She ended up at a facility that her doctor didn't have privileges at. What a crock. Sadly, oh so sadly, the obsession with heavy administrations and bureaucrats is not restricted to health care. Really if we dump the HST we have to hire 350 employees to manage the GST and PST? Why, when the taxes merged did the government dump all the employees that had been in that division or did they shuffle them off to another dept? And now this bullshit has trickled into private business sector - oh yes indeed - rather than doing our jobs effectively and efficiently we produce numerous documents reporting the exact same statistics in different formats. For some reason in this world we need more and more management making $ the rest of us could only dream of, while the hands on front end people are lost in bullshit.
Actually spending time picking up poop for sick and elderly critters makes you remember that there are more important things in life than bullshit.

Barbara

He turned 12 back in January. The hardest part for him is he already has a bad arthritic knee from a previous injury and generalized weakness in his hind quarters and now all this pain and trauma to his front paw. I just about fainted when I saw the dose of Tramadol the vet put him on after the second surgery...300mg q12h! I think that much would kill a human! I have to admit that his pain is well controlled and now I just feel so bad limiting him to short walks and no stair climbing (which means he has to stay downstairs which he hates when we are upstairs--velcro dog for sure!)

Carol Ann

My little Sweetie from LA is doing great she had her toe removed in December 2010. So far so good Good luck

Carol

poor max..good thoughts going his way!...we did the same surgery on sweetie (not the new haggy sweetie, but the sweet one from LA..in foster with carol ann) a few months ago so far so good..i don't think it has come back yet. max must be getting pretty old by now? esp. cuz he is really big guy!

Barbara

I love the idea of nurses forum, but I'm also profoundly frustrated knowing it would HAVE to be anonymous, because the repercussions to the nurses if their identities were known would likely be devastating. Public venting--at least where I work--will lead to punishment. I truly believe that administrators care about patients and staff but the tremendous (and demoralizing) financial constraints placed upon the health authorities by the provincial and federal govt's have forced otherwise good people to turn a blind eye to the effects their 'business model' has had on doctors, nurses, patients and all the others involved in providing health care. Those in administration who couldn't reconcile themselves to what is happening (in other words, they actually cared!) got burned out and left.

BTW, Max has squamous carcinoma in one of his toes. Two surgeries: first a partial amputation and now a full amputation on Monday and hopefully a cure. If it has metastasized to his lungs (CXR looked okay) he only has a few months. If they got it all then, likely he'll have a year. We see the vet this morning to peek under the dressing. Wish him luck.

I hope you have a better day today.

Carol

wow! scary experience for sure!

and barb..i have been thinking about starting an anonymous forum for nurses to honestly vent without reprecussions cuz the powers to be are not interested in listening anymore. bc has great imaginery health care on paper..but the reality is 20 years ago our patients got far better care.

i have had three elderly patients lately who broke down and cried they were so traumatized by the lack of care they received.

but i will tell you..each and every one said there was one or two nurses whose kindness and care deeply and forever touched them..they were so grateful for them.
and they are now saying, they would rather die then ever go back in.

so sad...standardization, multi-area managers and regionalization...the corporate mentality have ruined our health care and they keep coming up with new plans and ideas to make it worse every day.

they should let doctors and nurses run our hospitals like they used to..then it was about really providing good patient care not just making it look good on paper.

political parties and platforms have no place in determining our medical care.

Emma

What a terrible and frightening experience. Not one you will forget in a hurry. Shocked and sorry to hear about that.

Nancy

Back to the tail grabbing...I wish I'd known this yesterday.

While driving home with a friend, a pit bull flew straight across in front of the car, like it'd been shot out of a cannon. I've never seen a dog move so fast. It went straight across the street to the sidewalk, and chomped down on the neck of a retriever being walked by a young teen, who started screaming. We jumped out of the car, and ran over. A man ran over from the other direction. 3 strong adults, (and a totally traumatized young teen) and we couldn't get this pit bull off the other dog. I was sure it was going to kill it, there was blood everywhere. If the dog had been smaller it would've been instant. We were shouting, yanking, kicking,anything we could think of, and the pit bull did not even flinch, just kept it's iron grip locked on the other dog's neck, it just about had the retriever down on it's back...it was truly frightening. I kept thinking, what if it turns on us, especially the teen who was very tiny and had short sleeves. More cars stopped and a woman rifled through her groceries and found a spray bottle of some foam cleaner, I still don't know what it was, but I sprayed it into the pit bull's face and it paused for a millisecond, enough for us to pull it off the retriever. The retriever lost a lot of blood, but because of his size and long hair was lucky, his wounds seemed to be in the scruff and hopefully superficial, although he went to the hospital after Animal Control arrived and took pictures. Animal Control also suggested punching an attacking dog in the nose, this will startle it supposedly. The pit bull (who was now tied to a lamp post)was deemed dangerous, it's owner finally showed up after someone went to the door of the house where the dog seemed to come from - he had just moved there and had no idea that his untied dog was not in his unfenced yard, and oh yes, the dog's done this before.

I have children and a senior Yorkie X. I would like to hear other suggestions on how to deal with this dangerous type of dog attack.

Hillevi

My daughter is a nurse. She began in Women's Services (Cancer) and is now in an ER. The stories she tells . . . your comments just confirm what I have heard from her.

As for the dog fight tail grabbing thing . . . where was this post on March 15th? I could have used that knowledge on the 16th!

Barbara

Are you kidding? Morning care-even basic care-in the hospital has gone the way of the dodo bird. When we (staff nurses) complained about how busy we were, excessive workload, hallway patients and under-staffing, management told us to skip morning care (bed baths, showers, basic hygiene care) since it really wasn't important--if there was time later in the shift, we should do it then, sheesh! There is never time later in the shift. Along with that went time for regular turning and positioning for our bed ridden patients, patient teaching...sigh. We do the best we can and feel sick because it isn't what we were trained to do. Healthcare in BC sucks and it isn't because nurses don't care or don't want to provide the care patients deserve. Crappy day at work, too. Just venting! Sorry your day at work sucked too.

skye

Cleaning hospital bathrooms-Having had family in with chronic health issues for mths, thru the years. All family visiting made a point of always cleaning the bathroom:>)Bet it was wondered where all the hand wash went? :>)when it was filled, that is, and actually available to use :-( and the paper towels.

Carol

congrats lory!

and the whole bathroom thing pisses me off too...our clients are coming out of the hospitals now with bed sores..apparently turning bed ridden patients is no longer acceptable good time use practice but filling out all the reams of paper work is... we now have bed/pressure sore tracking documentation protocols! how about we skip that particular paper work pile and just turn our patients instead?

Lory

My daughter has been in hospital for 6 days and her bathroom has not been cleaned once. Maybe Gordon Campbell is looking for a new job! (Hope that makes you laugh, Carol). I am now a grandmother to a little boy so will have to learn hockey rules, I guess.

Carly

I got bitten by dogs on the hand a few times.The last major bite was because I grabbed her by the collar.I have also grabbed them by the tails(If they had one)to pull them away from partaking in the fight,or iniated it.Coming from working at a dog daycare where you get some unstable,ill,not fixed(or in heat)or just plain stupid ones can upset the room/and ones who came regularly.

Emma

I'm too scared to comment!