Well, I'm calming down a little bit now. Trying to get things in perspective.
For a while there, I was chewing nails, or spitting snails, or whatever that cute expression is that indicated that your pretty frickin' mad.
Everything was going along smoothly until about 05:00, when we had a young man come in who had reportedly been in a fight and then started having trouble breathing.
His BP was way down, and he was obviously bleeding internally... started pumping fluids into him and got him stabilized enough so that I could do x-rays and CT scans on him. I got the x-rays done, and we headed over to CT.
We got him on the table and there was a table fault. I re-booted the machine four times, taking about 20 minutes. Finally I gave up and moved him to the secondary machine and got through the exams... the whole thing should have been over in 20 minutes, and it took about an hour to get done.
An extra 40 minutes doesn't seem like very long, but when a patient needs to go to surgery, and needs a diagnosis before he goes, that 40 minutes can be critical.
And the answer that I got when I told the day CT tech about it? " Yeah, that happens all of the time. You just have to re-boot it until it works."
Not the answer. Not the answer at all, at all. The answer is for the damned machine to work. All of the time.
They are supposed to do an upgrade to solve all of the problems in June. In the meantime, I am going to call an extra tech in when I have critical patients to do. That way if the damned thing breaks down, there will be more help around...
One of the main problems is... I don't know if it's something that I'm doing wrong when it happens. And it never has been, but there's always that doubt in my mind... that I'm not doing right by my patients, that I don't know enough...
I stayed an extra hour, waiting for my supervisor to come in, but I talked to another supervisor and asked him to pass the word along... that I was mightily pissed.
OK, enough of that. Tuesday was Matt's birthday, and Karen had a party for him. She baked up some lasagna (which I've yet to taste...) and she said that they had a good time. However, the kids (or somebody) messed up Karen's computer so that it won't even boot, so I have to fix that soon... anyway, I left early to go to work and missed the festivities, not even seeing Matt to wish him a happy one. O'well, he didn't see me on mine, either, so we're even on that!
Karen came home early yesterday, about 10:00... I was still just barely up... she was sick. She laid down on the couch and I took her temp (99.9F) and got her some aspirins and water. She was still on the couch when I woke up at 19:30, didn't even have the TV on or anything. I got her up and sent her to bed before I left for work, and she slept clear through until about 09:00 this morning.
Patrick is sick, too. He got sick last night, and I just went over to get him... he was home alone today again.
So anyway, I'm tireder than usual... being angry does that to me, especially if I'm angry at something that can't be controlled... nobody to yell at... although I suppose that if I looked hard enough I could find someone... but that would take too much energy, and I don't have any left.
One more night. One more night. I can do it.
More tomorrow...