After two weeks of floating around the building for no good reason, I get stationed on my unit again tonight. My unit has become the short-stay rehab unit over the last few months because the short-stay rehab unit has been converted to the quarantine unit, but the last COVID patient was moved off the hall Monday; a woman with dementia who wandered everywhere while clutching dirty tissues in her hands and touching everything for support as she walks, so you tell me to my face that they got that unit deep cleaned in the sixteen hours before turning it back into the short-stay rehab unit. Look me in the eye and say that. But whatever. I'm going back to my home unit! Chin up!
When I get there tonight, I'm informed one of the patients on my side was sent to the hospital for a fall on evenings. I can hear someone at the end of the hall screaming once every second or so, like every exhalation has to be yelled out, so I go back and inspect it. It's a short-stay rehab patient, naturally, and one who came over while I was elsewhere so I don't know who they are. Well, whatever. I find the evening aide to get report, and am told I'll have to take vitals on the new patient because the evening aide can't get a reading, what with how the patient is shaking with their yelling and writhing.
I take their vitals while the evening aide watches, and tell her to get the nurse quick. The patient has a high fever, 02 sat in the low eighties on five liters, and a blood pressure I generally associate with dead people. The night nurse, I discover over the course of the next hour, is already alarmed before she gets this info because she found an expedited X-ray result the evening nurse neglected due to that fall I mentioned, and the X-ray shows among other things fluid infiltration heavily suggestive of pneumonia. We call the family, call the on-call doctor, and ultimately the paramedics. By the time they get here, the patient's BP is somewhat better and the O2 sat has raised to high eighties on ten liters, but the fever has gone up almost a degree. We ship the patient out.
The night nurse, now well into her shift with the evening nurse gone home, starts combing through paperwork and emails about the patient, whom neither she nor I have ever met before. We find out the patient has been receiving physical therapy from one of our employees who is now off work with COVID after going to a family Thanksgiving from which sixteen people also tested COVID-positive.
I was going to throw in some off-topic complaining about how my unit is a complete catastrofuck because the floaters they've had over here haven't been keeping up with necessary duties to maintain the place, but who even cares in the face of all that? I hate everything, is the point.
