HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAMA!!

Happy Birthday to my wonderful mom.
Mom, I hope you have a wonderful day cuz you deserve it!
You are just amazing and I hope you have an amazing year too :)
I love you!!!!!!!

Night 2 of 2, yes!

Well, it's 4:08am and we have been busy! Time has flown by and now I am finally sitting down to relax and I only have about 3 hours left. I have a bunch of things to do starting around 6:00am, so I have a couple hours to hang out.

I started with 3 patients and I now have 5. I got one admission at like 8:00p last night and one admission at 2:00am, a few hours ago. A sweet little lady. The nurse working with me tonight also got an early morning admission, so we've been busy! Everybody's falling and breakin' things tonight!

Things start to get a little harder to keep track of and organize once you get up to 5 patients. It's do-able at night while they mostly sleep, but I'm starting to forget their names and which is in which room, hahaha. Don't worry though, we have our cheat sheets in our pockets.

My patients are all pretty good. One lady is a bit confused and is being quite illogical, but she's not bad. I really couldn't ask for better, they're all sleeping pretty well.

I'm very excited to go home and sleep. However, I'll need to wake up after 5 hours of sleep to go see my child at Ben Franklin for Kid's Hope. This week we're doing homework and playing a game I think and maybe drawing with the new markers my mom bought for me to use with her, thanks Mom!

Yesterday, when I got home from work, I slept from 8a until 1:45 ish. I just woke up wide awake and went to hang out with my sweet husband who was doing homework all day. I went and worked out and then Chris and I went to Applebees! It's fun to go out to eat right before I come do an overnight. And that's all and here I am. I'm excited for way later today when I'm done with everything and I can just hang out! I have Tues off, but it's back here for Wed, Thurs, and Fri day shifts. I haven't had a day shift in almost a month! I'm kinda glad though; I had enough evenings for a while!

Well, my pinkie is hurting for some reason, so I'll say bye. Thanks for reading my blog!

Love you all!
~Brianna Marie Lewis

The Night

Hello, I am here at St. Mary's and you are sleeping.

It's 3:30am, 4 hours to go....
It's about this time when I so want to go in my cozy bed! I'm just dying to be home! It' s not so bad here though. My 4 patients are sound asleep and I forsee them staying that way, cross your fingers, but that also leaves me with nothing to do. I've talked with co-workers, read magazines, talked to my cousin online for 2 hours, ate some food, ate more food, tried to find fun things to do on the internet, etc. And now, I'm bored and sick of looking at the computer screen.

I'm on the Alfred side, the smaller hall of my unit and there's only me and one other nurse here. So, it's very quiet.

Let's see, on Friday, I got to be a part of a lil' surprise party for my cousin Jill, who just turned 16. It was a lot of fun, we surprised her at Holiday Inn, long story, and got to swim and such. On Saturday, which was technically yesterday, I tried to sleep as long as I could so I could stay up all night (now) and I made it until about 11:00, but I woke up a lot. It was kinda fun to stay in bed. Then I watched an episode of America's Next Top Model, in my jammies, and finally got up and went to lunch with Chris (after he got done with class) at Erb's. We then went and worked out at the Dan Abe. Chris had to work at 3:30, so I went over to my parent's house and had supper with them. Thanks Mama! It was yummy sketti. Then I left from there to work, where I have now been for the past 7 hours.

I have a pain pill to give at 4:00am, which is comin' up, hahaha, it's my one big task to accomplish :)
I figure if I were a patient and I was sound asleep I'd like to be left alone, so I've been leaving my patients alone. I've been peeking in on the ones who have their doors open to see that they're breathing.

Hmm, I now have, what appears to be, a small mosquito bite on my wrist. This just happened, great, there's a spider on me somewhere and I just got a posionous bite. Weird!

Well, I guess I'll go now. I'll be sleeping from like 8a to 3p today! Then I come back here for one more overnight.

See ya alls.
~Brie

Can't Believe I'm Blogging Again....

I think I just updated last night! But here I am again.

I had a feeling I'd be floating tonight and so I am, all eight hours. I am on Joseph 4B, a cardiac floor. I've been here once before. Since I'm not trained to read heart rhythms effectively, other nurses have to read my patient's monitors. I'm very very bored. I've kept slightly busy until now, but now I have an hour left. I have 3 patients. One is easy, one is super easey, and the third wishes me out of her room! She's not mad at me, she just really wants to be left alone, so I gave her some of her later meds early and I said I wouldn't be back unless she called me. She's now on the sleep enhancement protocol, meaning we're really supposed to limit our time in their so she can really sleep. 2 of my 3 have diseases I could catch, so I'm all gloved up and gowned up all night. But then again, I do that on my floor too. This boredom makes me appreciate my floor, I think. On my break, I headed back up to Joseph 7 and got to eat with 4 other girls I work with, so that was fun. It's funny, at least 1/2 of the nurses here right now, are floating here. So when we all got here they were asking me where to find stuff and I'm like yeh, I'm floating here too.

Today was neato, cuz I met my Kid's Hope child. It went really well. I have a little girl and she's extremely sweet and cute and energetic. When I met her, I told her we'd have an hour to do whatever we wanted (no homework tutoring on the 1st day) and her eyes lit up and she got all excited. I had her give me a tour of the school and I asked lots of questions and she just had a grand old time showing me everything. She has her picture up in a case for reading over the summer and she was very proud to show me that. It's always fun to show people around a place you know well and I could tell she had fun with it. Then we picked a spot in the library and played an I-Spy game with theses matching card thingies. She actually won! We started filling out a all-about-her sheet, but we didn't even end up finishing it because time went so fast. I'm honestly glad to go see her again next week. It was pretty funny.....here's our conversation

Me: We don't have to do homework today, but next week we will.
Her: What about tomorrow?
Me: Oh, well I come to see you only on Mondays
Her: Oh, not everyday??? Just Mondays???
Me: Yes
Her: So then I never have to do homework because my teacher said on Mondays we don't have to.
Me: I think your teacher just said no homework today. But we'll just do a little bit next week.
Her: Oh.

Hahah, funny. She totally though I came everyday, what a cutie.

I had a little bit of time after that to see Chris for a second before work. He was at Wendys and I was driving that way so we met at the Christian Book Store for about 10 mintues so I could tell him about it all.

Hmm, what else do I have to say.....
I work Tues and Wed evenings and then the OVERNIGHT WEEKEND, ahhhhhhh. I actually haven't done the overnight weekend in 12 weeks. I dread it, but at the same time, I'm kinda glad it's overnight this time and not in the day, there's just so darn much to do in the day so two 12 hour shifts are nuts. Well, at least I'm floating now so I don't have to this weekend, that would be a bummer, overnight on a floor where you know no one.

I'll be glad for next week when I start working days again. This is my 3rd week of evenings and I've had enough of them. They make me lazy in the day and I dunno how to stop that. All I can think of when I wake up is that I only have like 5 hours and then I gotta go to work. But when I work a day, I'm home by 4p and have the whole evening. It is a bummer to get up at 5:45, but it's better in the long run for me to just get up and get work done first.

I can't wait to go home! Ahhhh, it could be between 20 and 40 mintues before I get to leave and it can't come soon enough!

Ok, that's all folks. Have a wonderful week. Peace

Listing

November 3rd and 4th 2007 will never ever come again, so I thought I better document their happenings for all of history to read. (I'm copying the list style from my mom's blog, heehee)

Saturday:
1. Woke up at 6am, cuz Chris got up then for his class in the cities. But fell back asleep until 9:45am, sigh, it was great.

2. Worked out at the Dan Abe.

3. Went to Erb's and Gerb's with Christopher

4. Went to the new Target and got a gift card for cuzzin Jill

5. Went to new Dick's Sporting goods and tried out the virtual driving range. You actually get to hit a golf ball into a screen, it's cool.

6. Went to Jill's 16th b-day party. It was loads of fun. Watched Kellie/Whit cut bangs for Jill.

7. Went to the new theatre called Galaxy 14 Cine (but we're calling it " The Wehrenberg" you have to go there to understand. We went to alien child, it was very good. The theatre is odd. It's like 80s or 90s themed, all bright colors and neons lights, odd, but ok I guess. And after you get your ticket the lady like repeats back your movie and how much you paid into a microphone, therefore allowing everyone in close range to know what movie you're going to, weird.

Sunday:
1. Chris and I went to Emmanuel Baptist church (right next to where we live) for an assignment of Chris'. He had to go to a church of a different denomination and write a little paper on any differences. I was nice there, they were very friendly to us.

2. Met the fam at the mall. Saw Heather and Eric and talked to them for a bit.

3. Went to FINALLY get our wedding album! It's beautiful, well it better be after a year of waiting for it!

4. Went to show Mom the album and ended spending the afternoon there playing outside with Gav.

5. Mom, Dad, Chris, and I went on a long walk and then to Canadian Honker with Gaving too.

6. Just got home from that and will now go get in my jammies!

It was a wonderful weekend away from St. Mary's Hospital, where I have to go back to tomorrow. I also start Kid's Hope tomorrow and meet my child and hang with her, please pray that it goes well, I feel so nervous!

Love ya all! Have a good week.

Sunken Pumpkins

I'm blogging because I am bored out of my mind. I have 45 minutes left of work and I can hardly stand the thought of roaming the halls for that long, so I'm resorting to this to pass some time.

Last weekend we had a surprise party for Gran turning 70. It was at my uncle Randy's house in Lake Elmo. I think she was surprised! There were a lot of people there, mostly all the family. It's so wonderful to be with everyone. I just love my cousins and aunt and uncles and 2nd cousins and even 3rd cousins! We just hung out, ate food, played outside, and so on. The time went really fast. A strange thing happened to me on that day as well. My neck had been hurting in a strange way for a few days, but it hurt the worst that morning. As the day went on my neck got more and moe achy and the ache spread to my head and shouders and then arms. Pretty soon I just felt weird and very weak. I was seriously an effort to double click a mouse. On the drive home with mom, dad, and Gav, I felt the worst, but we had fun singing in the car, so I forgot about the pain for a while. I got to Mom's house and I had a temperature. I took some advil and felt a trillion times better and woke up better the next day. I called in sick to work for the first time cuz I still felt so weak and strange. But by the next day I was perfectly fine. Weird huh.

Chris and I just started something new togehter. It's called Kid's Hope. It's though our church and Ben Franklin Elementary. We've been paired up with a little kid and we spend an hour with them every week, doing homework and playing. Basically, they're kids who could use special attention for various reasons. We're just supposed to be a positive adult who cares about them, so we figured it would be a cool thing to do. I think I'm starting this Monday, I'm acutally a bit nervous, those kids are so darn scary, hehee. JK. It's just the thought of meeting someone new, always a little uncomfortable at first. Chris had a little boy and me a girl in the lower grades. We can stay with them all the way to 5th grade if we want.

So, Monday I called in sick, Tuesday I worked and then hung out with Casey @ WW and the mall, Wednesday I had off! Thursday (today) and Friday I work nights, bummer!!!
However, I have the weekend off and I'm going to see my Hemmer side on Saturday at my cousin Jill's b-day party. She turned 16 today acutally. Happy Birthday Jill!!!! And Kellie is coming home!

Yesterday, Halloween, I set candy out, but I don't think anyone took any. I went to Mom and Dad and hung out. Mom made us wonderful chili, I want some right now! We went on a littel walk to see the kiddies and a few came to Mom's house. We used to get a TON of kids, but now, since we're the last cul-de-sac and because North Park is so huge now, not as many people come all the way down to us, sad day. Chris and my pumpkins are starting to bite the dust. Can you just throw pumpkins away in the normal garbage? I guess so. They're getting soggy and caving in. Hahaha.

Well, I'm very eager to start a new job, but then I'm not at the same time. There's so many things I don't like here. But there's the fear of worse things somewhere else, ahh, I dunno what to do. I think I'll stick with my unit for a bit so I get to be a part of the new unit the end of December. Then I'll start really thinking about changing my job. I don't wanna get sucked into working here forever just because it's comfortable. I do wanna learn different things and never work on a floor again. I like many things about my floor. I do like the patients and spending time with them and making their day better and as oranized as can be. And I do like the people I work with and really getting the hang of things here. But it's just too psychotic, I'm willing to deal with it, but I don't wanna do this long-term. It's non-stop crazines and dis-organization. I feel like I have to organize everything, between patients, doctors, family members, physical therapy, everything. It's annoying and impossible sometimes. I would like to work somewhere where the patient is there temporarily, like the OR, where they come, get a surgery done, and leave. Some of our patients are here for months and months. There's just so much to deal with. Whatev, I'll just keep truckin' along. I do appreciate my job though, I get a paycheck because of it and I've learned a ton, so there are good things.

Okay, now I have about 20 mintues to spare, nice.

Hmm..what else can I talk about, la de dah......

Sadly, I have nothing else to say. I hope I didn't bore you all to death.

~Brianna