Be great at my job

I’ve been working a crazy amount of overtime. I’m not sure how I feel about this. It’s obviously good to be making more money, but I’ve been getting truly exhausted and run down. Looking at the way my life is now – single and living by myself, there probably isn’t a better time to be doing this. It’s not like I need to come home and get children ready for school or make dinner for everyone. My little kitty has been patient (for the most part!) with her mom spending so little time at home.

Still…the exhaustion is really getting to me. I’ve worked a lot of doubles, including last night 3pm-7am, and have been regularly putting in 60+ hours a week. Almost all of the overtime is on the night shift because our staffing has been so short there. The experience I’ve gained has been great – nights is completely barebones in terms of staff and I’ve had to make a lot of decisions without the luxury of running them by more experienced techs. Terrifying to say the least, but a character builder to be sure.

I know it’s not going to be around forever. We have a girl training for a night position and some other people have said they will expand their hours or switch to nights in the near future. I suppose while it’s here, I should suck it up and work as much as I can!

at work today. The Chemistry supervisor of my lab pulled me aside, very serious and stern, to tell me that my “turn-around-time” for STAT specimens in Chemistry is the worst in the lab. I was stunned. Completely shocked to put it mildly. Turn-around-time is the time from when a blood sample comes into the lab till the time the results are released to the doctor. It is our policy that the turn around time can be no longer than an hour for STAT specimens.

I’ve been working hard at this since I was hired and felt that I was doing a really good job. There are people that I work with that appear to not take the turn around time seriously…leaving samples waiting while they talk on the phone or go out for smoking breaks. I think because I made a point to work hard at this and felt I was doing well, it comes as a shock to me that I would be the worst, basically.

I’m going to need to be extra mindful of this and try to improve myself and my speed at work.

...was such a busy night at work. I didn’t stop moving from the moment I walked in till the moment I was pulled (literally pulled) off of my bench and told to go home. We had a number of patients who were critically ill and receiving a lot of blood products. It was a real challenge for me to try to stay on top of everything.

It’s in these times at work that I feel the most passionate about what I do. Being able to help save a patient’s life – even if that patient never sees me or knows I am there – is endlessly gratifying and rewarding.

I worked alone last night in the blood bank. So far I’ve been lucky that everything has been really calm and quiet while I’ve been getting the hang of things. While any area of the lab can be a crazy place if there is an emergency, nothing really compares to an emergency in the blood bank.

Trauams come in, people start bleeding out on the operating table…and they need blood immediately. That feeling that right then, in that moment, that person’s life depends on YOU and how fast you can move and how accurate you can be with your testing under pressure is really terrifying.

So anyway, last night was my first taste of an emergency. It was right around 11pm…half an hour before I was suppose to leave. I was cleaning up and getting things ready for the next shift to come in. A blood sample came in STAT on a patient along with an order for blood. I put it the sample in the centrifuge to spin, and right then the phone rang. The doctor was calling, and he explained breathlessly that they needed the blood on the patient right now.

There was no way I could get blood ready immediately. The sample needed to spin down, then a type and screen would have to be done. Then cross matches with available units of blood. This would all take another half hour at least.

I told him I couldn’t get the blood ready that quickly, but he could take uncrossmatched units if he needed it. He said they needed it, and was sending someone down immediately to pick up the blood.

It was then I started to shake. Not just my hands, but like whole body shakes. I was absolutely terrified. There is a whole protocol to follow for giving out uncrossmatched blood, and all of that flew out of my head in that moment.

I gulped, took a deep breath, and launched into action. Things started to come back to me. Grab O-negative units. Pull off samples for later testing. Label with bright orange “uncrossmatched” stickers. Print up tags for the units. As I ran around a nurse ran in to take the blood. I hurried to sign out the units and she ran them up to the patient floor. My heart was beating like a jack-hammer the whole time.

Wheww. I can honestly say I’ve never felt that nervous in my whole life. From talking to my co-workers, this will get easier everytime I go through it, but everyone has said that that heart-in-your-throat feeling never goes away. I hope that the patients here stay nice and healthy and I don’t have to go through this again for a long time!

Today was an example of how when things go bad in the blood bank, they go very bad very quickly.

We had a woman who came into the ER today who slipped and fell on a slippery crosswalk, and was subsequently hit by a car. (Not at all a pretty thing to happen. I felt so terrible for her).

She was quickly moved to the OR and was going down fast. We were trying to type and crossmatch units of blood for her, but before we could finish finding compatible units the OR called up that they needed the blood now. Uncrossmatched.

Giving out uncrossmatched blood is something that I will inevitably have to do but it’s such a terrifying prospect. It’s a situation where the person needs blood so quickly that there isn’t time to test if the units are compatible. All you can do is give O-negative blood and hope that it’s ok. And every second counts. The second you get the call, you know someone is dying down there. You have to move getting that blood prepared and ready to give to the doctors. This is the type of situation where I hope to God I don’t freeze.

It was such an intense experience. When I start working for real, I can only hope that I don’t run into something like this until I have more experience under my belt to deal with it.

I have a job – nay, a career. Now that I’ve got it set in front of me, I have this nagging driving to be great at it.

I worked a double yesterday…7am to 11pm. I never did anything like that before, so it was an interesting experience.

I did great until about 9pm, when my eyes started drooping and I started seeing double. It helped that I had a bunch of positive blood cultures right around then to get me up and moving out of my chair. Those and the constant stream of flu swabs (tis flu season after all!) kept me going through the evening hours. I hope I can get more overtime opportunities in the future, as they will really help out a lot with my savings goals.

About a week ago I had my first time alone in the Chemistry lab. Holy mother of God. I can’t even describe the sheer terror that went through me like lightning. A description is in order.

I’m still in training at work so I’m not technically suppose to be alone. My trainer, however, decided to go for a smoking break and then went to dinner, leaving me alone for 45 minutes. Nine chemistry analyzers all to myself. Boy did I feel powerful. (This didn’t last long).

The very first sample I touched was wrought with problems. Her electrolytes were so different from the previous that it needed to be rechecked. I put it on the instrument to rerun it – and the instrument broke down. Like a car sputtering and coughing to a stop, the instrument just died. Immediately, as if on cue, two STAT samples come in that can only be run on the broken instrument. The clock starts ticking.

I run to the other chemistry analyzer and start my problem specimen running for the recheck. A blood gas comes in. I run to the blood gas analyzer and try to run the sample. It starts fine, until that machine starts hiccuping and beeping. I look in the little window and see a giant blood clot making its way toward the delicate glass tubing. I try to stop the machine – too late – the clot gets stuck in the tubing, making the machine useless.

The phone rings – it’s the ER calling about my problem patient – apparently the patient is coding and being rushed to the OR and they need the results now. Not in a minute, NOW. I break into a cold sweat and abandon the blood gas and run to the chemistry analyzer. The results are just starting to come off. I read them off to her, and while doing so I see more blood gases are coming in. I remember I broke the instrument so I tell the nurse that the instrument is down and run back to my broken chemistry analyzer where the STATS are waiting to be run.

It’s a mess. A slide jam. I open up the hood and there is a dizzying array of tubes, dials, things I don’t even have names for. I grab a wrench and try to remember what they told me about fixing slide jams. The phone starts ringing off the hook again.

My trainer appears behind me. “What the hell kind of mess did you make in here while I was gone!” She takes my wrench and PRESTO the machine is fixed. Samples running smoothly. Knocks the blood gas machine around a bit and gets that up and running. I can feel the color returning to my face.

I don’t think I was ever happier to see someone in my life. I have a feeling I need a bit more practice before I’m completely alone again. :)

“Whenever you see the word “Client” in something to do with building, you know there just has to be an architect involved because no one else in the building game ever refers to anyone as “clients.” It is such a strange word, isn’t it? In a shop you are a customer, on a train you are a passenger, in a hospital you are a patient, in a class you are a student, in the economy at large you’d be a consumer. But client? The only people who have clients are lawyers, architects and prostitutes, all of whom have to live with the reputation that they are simply out to screw you. Only the prostitute is honest about it.”

I have come to this new field almost for 5 months, everything is so fresh for me first. And I am really strange with most of the things, so I found that I couldn’t deal with the things very perfectly or carefully, there always some defects left.
Recently I have considered this not only once. Maybe I have known a little about this new job and this new field. But I do not want to find some excuses for my carelessness. Maybe I didn’t do things very carefully.
I hope from now on I can deal with the job more seriously, at least less and less defects left.