What the ER Staff is Actually Talking About at the Nurse's Station

I feel like I've been doing a lot of complaining lately, but damn, has it been horrible up in here at Hood Hospital, guys. Anyway. I'm kinda bored with it and I'm not even expecting to be able to go pee or take a lunch anymore, so I'm really just pleasantly surprised when I'm not getting poop all over me or getting sworn at. So I'm going to skip the latest rant about asstards running the asylum while I have 3 patients at death's door at once and just tell you for a bit about how the ER staff deals with pain and suffering.

As you may have learned from ERP's pain scale, ER staff have chronic rectal pain. For obvious reasons. If you have any questions go ahead and click on that link there.

Oddly enough, we've had an ongoing discussion similar to this one for about a year and a half now, but more focussed on the tools necessary to do your job. For example, "Oh, you picked up a shift with the B team this weekend? And doctor slow as hell is here? Dude. Go ahead and grab about 6 of those surgical lubes and hold on to them so you don't run out on Friday."

Multiple surgical lube packets will usually suffice from day to day, but if you have ICU holds or it's a full moon, yeah, you're gonna probably need to go down to central supply and get you some industrial size lube out of the urinary cart. If any of these things happens to fall on a Monday or management is here as charge because we're short staffed, you best skip on down to sono and borrow their big bottle.

If any of the above happen and you also happen to be working part of a day shift, no amount of lube will help and you need to call the pharmacy to upgrade to Lidocaine jelly. See if they can throw in some Toradol for the impending inflammation.

Lately it's been bad enough that my work BFF and I decided that we need to appropriate the HurriCaine spray for this purpose. The pain of our shifts is now measured in how many of those little straws we have to tape together to reach the site of our pain.*

Yes, this really is how I survive all the foolishness from day to day. I'm not real sure if I want to know what this says about me as a person.

*Hood Nurse and Hood Hospital Inc. do not actually endorse the off label use of Hurricaine spray in the rectal region. Please do not try this at home.