Long time, no blogging. It's been a little busy around here and I'm finding that juggling 4 kids, 3 in school, activities, work and all the extra meetings I've been going to, and running...really just life in general has made it hard to keep up. We're only a few months away from moving into our new building at work and we're working very hard to make sure we're ready. It's been pretty slow at work because the other hospital opened it's new birthing center about a month or so ago. It really stinks that we've been slow because I'm craving deliveries and every time the phone rings, we hope it's ER. More often than not, it's the other hospital, calling for prenatal records for patients who have gone over there for the new building but had initially planned to come to us. We're fairly certain once we open, it'll swing back because everyone wants the "new", but right now, we're able to do one on one care, which is every nurses dream. Anyway, with it being slow, it's also allowing us to work on the process of going from a LDR to a LDRP. I have concerns. I just don't know how it's going to flow, how we're going to know what's going on in the department, but part of it is I haven't taken a tour of the new building. I figure I'll wait a month or two when all they'll really be doing is putting in finishing touches and I'll be able to visualize the department. It's just going to be different and it will take some getting used to. We'll adapt because we're a pretty flexible staff and we're already making big strides in the right direction. We now are doing skin-to-skin with almost every delivery (unless mom doesn't want to or the baby needs some extra stimulation), I'm on a tachysystole group and we're working on developing standing orders for how to deal with tachysystole, either spontaneous or pitocin-induced tachysystole. Along with this, we will have a pitocin checklist that must be filled out prior to starting pitocin and thankfully, we have good support from the physicians so far.
Outside of work, I've been running, working towards my next race. I had been debating on whether I should run a half marathon or a full marathon in April. I've decided that I just don't have the motivation to run in the cold, so I'll just be doing a half marathon. Ok, so I know that sounds ridiculous, "just" a half. I am running the marathon again next October and I already have my training plan. My hope is that I can really train properly and shave off a decent amount of time. I *think* I may be able to finish in 5 hours if I really start working slowly towards that goal now. But even just finishing in 5:30 or 5:45 would be fine. We'll see where the next 11 months take me.
