May 12, 2009
Saturday, May 9, I went to volunteering and at first I thought it was going to be another really slow day, but I was completely wrong. About a half hour after I got there I was doing errands left and right. We kept getting calls from the 2nd floor, 3rd floor, the pharmacy, and other units to deliver lab runs to the main lab. These type of errands are really easy but when the nurses from the floors call to have a specimen picked up and 2 minutes later they call for another, it can become kind of hectic. Mike, Marie, Alex, and I were all discussing that the nurses should wait a few minutes so that everything can go together in one errand because we also have other runs that we need to do. Talking with them did work because Mike kindly asked the nurses to do so, so that we can all work together on a better pace.
For the entire day I discharged 4 people and Alex did as well; Mike discharged 1 patient. They all seemed to be females and we thought it was because mother's day was the next day (who knows!) Having this many discharges, and almost one after another, is extremely hard. It is more time consuming than just dropping something off at the lab because it involves; picking the patient up with the wheel chair, bringing them to the entrance of the hospital where their ride has parked, waiting for their ride to bring the car around to the door, going back to the desk to whip down the chair with a disinfectant whip, and then we have to call in to the phone service for the people who have left so that they know which rooms and which beds are now available. It doesn't seem like much, but the time in which we are gone when we discharge a patient seems like forever on a day that is really busy because the desk, where Mike and Marie work at, gets so many calls looking for us to run errands for them.
In all, the day went by pretty fast because we were so busy. And even though we were very busy it was nice because it has been slow for the past couple of weeks and when it is slow there is hardly anything for us to do, especially when Alex is there with me.
