Gray days

Will the rain ever stop in Napa? Just when you think it won't, you get a beautiful sunny day with blue skies...yeah and I'm stuck at work for 12 hours. Figures, huh? Does that happen to you too or is it just me?
I went "home" to Oklahoma this past week to help my husband close our store. Sad, but exciting in a way, at least now we'll be together again. We can concentrate on paying our bills and having some fun together. The business was a fantastic opportunity for us to see how we can work together. It was such an awesome learning experience, I wouldn't have given it up for anything.
He is on his way here now from Oklahoma. He says the weather there is gray and rainy, at least he will have a view here with the gray rainy weather. It's about a 3 day drive, unfortunately I have to work so I can't meet him in Vegas like I was planning. It's ok, I'll be off when he gets here.
I have just 3 more weeks on 2North. It will be strange to go to another floor but I will probably have to float from there too. I actually am going to offer to float so that the travelers that have been up there don't have to. There really is no bad place to float to in the hospital, 2North is the hardest floor and I'm used to it. The weekend at work was fairly calm. Friday we had a code. It was not my patient so I helped empty the room for the crash cart and the crowd of people then made sure the other patients were taken care of. I later found out it was a patient I had taken care of last week for 4 days before she went for heart valve replacement surgery. When I heard it was her it felt like someone had hit me in the stomach. I cried. She was a sweet lady with a lot to live for. It's something I see over and over. She was the caretaker for her husband and was neglecting her own health. By the time she came to the hospital, she was very sick. She made the brave decision to go through with the surgery despite the odds, without it she knew she would only have about 6 months. She made it through the surgery and was supposed to go home the day she died. She had gotten up that morning, had her breakfast and her meds, got cleaned up and even washed her hair. It just goes to prove that you never know. When it's your time, it's your time and no amount of live-saving measures will change that.
The week before I went on my little vacation I had a similar experience. There was a patient I had taken care of for a few days and had a day off so my assignment changed and he was no longer my patient. The heart monitor started to alarm and everyone went running to the room. He had a roommate so I grabbed a wheelchair and took him down the hall to our waiting room. Luckily the roommate was mobile enough to get in a wheelchair otherwise we would have had to find an empty room (not very common) to move his bed into. That was a hard one because the code lasted about an hour. There were several of the patients doctors in the room and his family had just left so we had to call them back. The roommate, who we subsequently moved to another room, kept asking what happened to his roommate. I was inclined to tell him about the patient not making it but then HIPPA was in the back of my head. I told him his condition was very serious. After all what would you think if the guy you were talking to this morning was dead this afternoon...wouldn't it scare you little if you were a patient. We as medical professionals see it all the time, not that we get used to it, but we know it's a fact of life. What if this guy had talked with the patient who died and they had the same thing wrong with them, wouldn't that be scary? I never did get a straight answer from anyone as to what we could tell the poor guy, luckily he wasn't my patient so I could avoid the situation. I really felt bad for the nurse. He was in there for an hour trying to help the doctors save his patient and when he was done he just had to go right back to the floor and work like nothing happened. Cops get counseling or a debriefing if they are involved in a shooting or a really bad accident, so they can talk about it ,don't they? We as nurses are just supposed to deal with it and go on. I told him to go take a break that I'd watch his patients. It seems to be the norm everywhere I've been...just deal with it and go back to work. Sad, in such a caring field, who cares about our feelings?