Not much new

I had a much needed 4 days off in a row. I was actually able to get caught up on thing around the house. And I was able to get away from work for awhile. I keep dreaming about what it would be like to work with plenty of staff for all the patients. The last night I worked, we had so many people coming in that we ended up running out of labor rooms and our last admission delivered in our recovery room. Not a real great place to deliver. Lucky for her she came in at 8 cm and delivered within 10 minutes, so a real bed probably wouldn't have been any more comfortable than the recovery cart she was on. Here was the morning RN:patient ratio (all patients actually were laboring. 3 RNs: 9 ACTIVE labor patients. Luckily, we didn't have any emergencies.
Over the weekend I worked with my least favorite nurse. I'm sure everyone works with someone like her: little experience, big attitude and thinks she knows all. I can usually deal with her but this weekend she crossed the line. She has little or no compassion for people. For example, she was taking care of an induction. The patient was contracting every 2-3 minutes and asked for something for pain at 5a.m. (she had come in at midnight). She came out to the desk and told me her patient asked for pain medication and here's what she told her "I told her to wait until dayshift gets her at 7a.m. and we'll re-evaluate your pain then." I then asked her if she ever takes motrin for menstrual cramps. She said yes. So I then explained the difference between the pain of cramps and contractions and told her she needed to give the poor woman some pain meds. Back to this weekend though. They had a woman come in 25 weeks by ambulance with feet hanging out her vagina last week. THey couldn't hear the heartbeat because of the positition so they took her back to the OR to deliver the baby by c-section if they determined by sono that the baby was still alive. Unfortunately, the baby was dead. They went ahead and gave her a spinal because they had to go in and deliver the baby and they needed to make sure the placenta came out completely. This nurse, I'll call her Jane, was telling me about this Saturday. Very sad. But what made me want to strangle Jane was when she started saying that it took 2 people to hold the mom down after they told her that her baby died. She seemed to think it was inappropriate behavior. And the tone of voice and other things she said about this mom just pushed me over the edge. I told her that it would probably take 2 people to hold me down had I been told my baby had died. I understand that this mom used cocaine and thats what led to the unfortunate events, but I doubt she wanted to kill her baby. I just was floored at Melissa's attitude toward this mom. I'm sure she was rude and inappropriate with this mom judging by the things she told me. Luckily, there aren't that many Janes out there.
On to happier topics, I felt the little bean move for the first time. I had felt things earlier that I thought might be the baby, but this was definately baby. I had forgotten how cool it was. It's a little reassurance. We also decided not to wait until birth to find out sex. It's just too tempting and I'm too much of a control freak not to know. I want to have the baby's room set up with clothes and blankets, that aren't all yellow and green. This weekend we played with the sono machine trying to see if there are dingle berries or not. Now we don't really know what we're doing, but I think, 60% boy. But the bean wasn't really cooperating. At first it looked like girl parts, but then we thought we saw boy parts. But we could see where the umbilical cord was and what we were looking at looked too big to be the genitals at this stage. So, really, we dont know. We may get to find out on 8-9 when I have a professional sono, if he/she cooperates.