failure. Your shift starts at 0630. You aren't to clock in before 0623.
Thirty minutes isn't long enough to set up for a shoulder. You'll be late
with a 0700 start time and late with the following 4. To make matters
worse, at 0715 your sadistic charge nurse hits the door with the
stretcher and your 0700 patient. She snidely tells you she'll get the
patient settled while you continue to search for the things you don't
seem to have in the room yet.
• This surgeon's preference sheet hasn't been updated in 5 years.
There hasn't been a new person working here in 5 years. All of the old
people here know what he wants before he has asked for it. Guess
where that leaves you.
• You hang 2 3000-liter bags at once with 2 more ready to go for the
arthroscopy, but 45 minutes later you hear a sound you never want to
hear. You jump and quickly look at the pump. Tiny bubbles. Grrr. Grab
another bag of saline and hang it as fast as you can.
• While struggling to hang more saline, you notice your feet are slosh-
ing around in water on the floor. Of course it's hard to see because the
surgeon wants the room pitch black. Getting down and looking much
closer, you see that somehow the suction tubing has disconnected from
the suction apparatus. Your best guess, there is 6,000 liters of NaCl on
the floor. You want to abandon ship.
• When you are up to your acetabulum in alligators (certainly possi-
ble with all the saline on the floor), Godzilla the charge nurse tells you
that she needs someone to stay over to finish this room. You agree to
stay over, but only if doctor "Wreck-It Ralph" takes a Midol or triple-
strength ibuprofen for his PMS behavior.
• Your EMR program is possessed by evil spirits. So far it's kicked
you out of the system twice and frozen the screen once. You're behind
in the redundant charting and documenting implant information in 4
Behind Closed Doors
BCD
1 4 0 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J U N E 2 0 1 6
