June 30th - blog 2 - observations change

So – here we are on another day. The nurses on duty, only 3 of them; Jen, Cheryl and yes, you guessed it Claire. 3 trained staff and no NAs. Jen is truly a sensational nurse, and must have been having an off-day on the day when I first fell over. She has performed the work of 2 NAs all morning whilst assisting Claire, managing telephone calls from here, there and everywhere, taking control when a doctor in training couldn’t find his way around, picking up piles of towels from the floor and handling all her sister-ing duties. These today are quite onerous because she is sorting out what transpires to be a bit of a mess left after the weekend.
Agency staff are paid nearly three times as much as bank staff. For a bank shift Jen was paid £160 on Friday night. The same staff from an agency cost £500 or more. Yesterday Priscilla and Jane were our trained nurses on duty…only they weren’t and Jen had to pay (out of the ward budget which it transpires she manages) for an agency nurse yesterday that they ‘didn’t really need’. Only they did – because Priscilla was not here yesterday morning and has not altered rotas or told anyone this fact…controversy. Add to this that the agency nurse (Plecidia) completely cocked up on nearly all of the drug allocations. Including Mary who insisted yesterday that she had the wrong tablets…well she did. Not that that changes her negative attitude and the reception she is receiving from the staff on duty.

To whit she just asked for a commode. And Jen marched her to the toilet (she walked better than I can) and is now taking her blood pressure and criticising her defeatist attitude. Its fantastic! Gemma looks five hundred times better and is ‘starving’ – maybe I was wrong about her, but then I sense that she is turbulently emotional and that this impacts her nutritional intake. But then doesn’t it for everyone?

Yeah – it genuinely does. Emotionality affects the way we feel about food – and I have learnt this in an extremely physical and dramatic way. Yet in my emotional correctness now I feel fantastically competent around food. And Gemma, well I see her flimsiness and an attitude that won’t harm her, it’ll just always mean that she eats emotionally – which everyone does and billions of people feel no effect from. My tendency is to over-analyse people’s attitudes and responses to food forgetting that I behave identically, but my emotions and my potential to feel them all and accurately behave in response to all of them were severely limited by my chemical makeup throughout my youth. Gemma probably does not have that problem…she’s just a teenager, a stereotypical, bog-standard, emotionally volatile teenager. And by God is that refreshing…I like not seeing disorder in everyone, just humanity. Food is the first thing that goes out the window in hospital and people are so funny about it. And yet it is just the demonstration of their emotionality at the very fact that they are in hospital and emotional to begin with and their appetites are thus affected.

Understanding that, understanding that people are flimsy and temperamental and I was just the same but only couldn’t feel anything emotional to have authority or assessment capacity within. Well…I like knowing all that I’m learning at the moment. It’s a real observation of reality and not hyper-monitorisation. That’s huge because it changes the way in which I must be approaching my life…and I like feeling a little less tense and hyper-observational about myself, everyone else and everything else I contact.