Girls Behaving Badly...

This is the only way I can describe my last 2 nights at work...

It all started when I had 10 days off in a row -- 2 sick, then 8 scheduled. I had been home so much that I was DYING to get back to work...I know...I never thought I'd feel that way! I was working with some fun people the last 2 nights, and I started "playing" a little...just for kicks.

Thursday night was fairly steady, we'd come in to a mess and were just cleaning it all up. The computers had been down all day, so there was a bit more chaos in the ER than usual. We are currently working in a "pod" system, where nurses are assigned to work in a pod, or certain clusters of rooms. We have the rooms in the ER split into 3 of these pods, even though sometimes we have to overlap. Ed was in one pod on his own and had 4 patients. The rest of us had at least 2 nurses in our pods, and had 1-3 patients each. Ed was clearly the busiest. Then I was supposed to get another pt in my pod, coming in by wambulance, but the room was dirty in my pod, so Shay (charge nurse) asked if I'd take the pt even though she had to put him in Ed's pod. I told her I'd be happy to, if I could play with Ed's mind a little first. She agreed, so I sent one of the EMT's in with the ambulance pt to start getting vitals, IV's, blood, etc... then I tracked Ed down, pulled him out of a patient room, and took him over to the board where we were looking at all the patients in the ER, and were able to see which nurses had which pts. He saw that clearly he had the most patients and I asked him, "Does Shay hate you? Why is she giving you this new ambulance patient when there are other nurses that aren't as busy?" That's all it took...he was getting worked about it. He said something like, "I know! Look...xxx only has 2 patients and one of those is getting discharged!" So I said, "you'd better go talk to her...this isn't right!" He marched down the hall to find Shay, the charge nurse to talk about it. As soon as he cleared the corner, I smiled and walked in the patient's room to get report on this new patient from the ambulance crew. I was just finishing getting report when I saw Ed coming back towards me, smiling but mad because he knew I'd really gotten him worked up over nothing. I guess he approached another nurse and asked if she'd take this new one in his pod to help him out, and she said she was busy. Then he found Shay and had just launched into how upset he was and how unfair this assignment was when she stopped him and said, "Wendy's just playing with you..." and he knew I'd gotten him good! It made me giggle for a couple of hours afterwards, though he did get me fairly wet with a syringe of saline...

Friday night, again we were all busy for a while, but I had some extra single-use packages of lubricating jelly sitting around at the desk for some reason, and decided to have some fun...again at Ed's expense. I ripped one of the packages open and dropped it into his back pocket on his scrubs, in passing. Sadly, it got quite busy after this, and I never did get to see his reaction when he discovered his pocket full of jelly... he never knew it was me thankfully, and now that I've written about it, I will have to watch my back!

But it's been fun!