Tuesday, December 9, 2008

First Day Back to Work

I thoroughly enjoy my job. It's strange not to be so very busy at work...I'm used to the pace of an Intensive Care Unit. A Health Clinic in an Embassy is not a busy place ordinarily. It wasn't a busy place yesterday afternoon. We had two patients in the four hours I was there. I'm actually hoping that there will be lots of additional duties that I just haven't heard about yet. Either that or I'll be posting my blog entries from work.

For now my start time is 1 PM, I arrived at around 12:45 and everyone but one of the secretaries was at lunch still. I snooped around and set up my desk a bit until the other nurse got back and started my orientation. They'd warned me that the orientation would only take about an hour (I'm used to 7-14 day orientations) and they were not far off. Our doc is out of town but he's a great guy. We've got our Nurse Practitioner Patty, a full-time nurse Robyn and two secretaries Silvia and Paula. They're all extremely nice.

As "easy" as this job is compared to ICU nursing, the job is very different so I have lots to learn. No respiratory technician, no ECG technician, no lab technician for blood draws and we run our own pharmacy. Nothing terrifying but definitely different.

Robin had left for the day, Patty was at her Spanish class and Sylvia came to let me know that someone had come to be seen if possible, was I willing to see them? I said "Sure!" - trying to convince myself simultaneously that I could jump into this. It ended up being a simple diagnosis and it didn't require much medical knowledge to pull it off...more of a mom knowledge thing. Whew! I told Patty about it when she returned and she was very happy with my first patient interaction too.

Jake called me as soon as he got home. He was a little concerned about not having Mom-access but when I got home, he admitted that it wasn't bad at all. Another whew! It also didn't hurt that I came home to Dominga making dinner and a beautifully clean house. This we can all live with!

1 comment:

patsyrose said...

I'm glad you're back to work. All that fun and adventure must have been hard on you. LOL!

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