I know I've been MIA. I come on here to check if anyone has written something, but then I can't get myself to sit here and actually type anything. So here I am. It's early. I did my 4 12-hour shifts since Thursday. I was exhausted yesterday. But of course, I couldn't sleep in today. It was habit for me to wake up at 5am. Then I just laid there and waited for Kee to wake up. He left for work about a half hour ago. And here I am, drinking coffee and eating oatmeal. Well, forcing myself to eat oatmeal. I hate the stuff.

Well, it is Tuesday October 28 and as of yesterday I have 2 more shifts to go. I did WORK this weekend with my 36 hours of clinical. Wake up, get ready, spend almost 13 hours at O'Connor working my ass off, come home, wash up, sleep. And then wake up to do it all over again. Saturday was fine. I was stoked to work with my other preceptor, Mary. Then Sunday was good. Surprisingly I had a lot of energy. And we even snuck off to get Japanese food for all of us working that day.

Yesterday though...I was exhausted. I worked with my other preceptor, Nilo. The day started off crazy because we had an admission that came in around 630 with a L Femoral Neck fracture. The admission hadn't been done yet, the chart wasn't done yet, and we had no idea when she was going in for surgery.

...i hate oatmeal...

Anyways, so of course that was our patient. So we were trying to get everything ready on her and go see our other 3 patients. We finally got settled around 10. Then I had to discharge 1 of them. And then after lunch I got a post-op Total Hip and a transfer from PCU s/p acute intracranial bleed.

So I'm assessing my new patients and trying to get them settled and all of a sudden the unit goes dark. All the power is off. Within a few seconds the emergency generator is supposed to go off.

It didn't.

And JACHO is right down the hallway.

So I'm watching the surveyors and they walk away. They were supposed to come to our unit next. We had spent all morning preparing for them. They were gone. And the power was still off. water was off, too. We had no idea what was going on.

So now I've got a post-op patient whose pain is starting to climb up. Can't get her Morphine because the Pyxis is down. Can't get her ice packs 'cause the power is out. It was a mess. We finally got power in the nurses' station 45 minutes later or so. And then full power in all the rooms at around 5.

At first we thought it was a drill because of JACHO. Maybe they were testing our disaster preparedness. Obviously they failed that one. Come to find out later...they think there was a car accident and that a car hit a transformer and wiped out power in the neighborhood. And they're still investigating why the generator didn't come on.

Like I told Mary yesterday...it was like Grey's, but with no sex and no hot young patients. :)