It's only half a day!

Maybe it was just how the day's worked out.  Maybe it was just three bad days in a row... but maybe it wasn't.

I left you off last time saying that I was entering the 'bad' time of my schedule where I would be working three days in a row.  Well they weren't pleasant.  In fact I've only now really began to get out of my bad 'mood'.

Tuesday was my eight hour day, and I can honestly say that being the last nurse 'in' isn't fun.  All of the computers were full and I had a call out as soon as I walked in the door, so I had to scramble to get a workplace set up.  Technically I was in the med room that day, but the scheduling supervisor seemed to forget that and had me almost a full day's worth of appointments to keep.  That meant I got into the med room late and did a barely acceptable job of it.

Wednesday was certainly not a 'normal' day.  First off we didn't have enough people on staff, so there were two people brought in on overtime to cover.  But the shifts that they worked were far from anything 'normal.  One med room nurse cam in at 4pm.  The other was scheduled in at 6, but came in late and didn't arrive until 7... just before the med pass started.  Not having any time to set up the med room before the med pass invariably led to the med pass taking about two hours (as opposed to the normal one hour).

12 hour shifts, new music, a new car for mom, and Joanna.

Well, I've had my first week of 12 hour shifts.  Obviously with an 80-hour, 2-week pay period, there is a 'light' week (working three 12 hour shifts), and a 'heavy' week (working three 12 hour shifts, along with an eight hour shift).  In my case this difference is actually enhanced by the way the days on and off are arranged.

This past week was my 'light' week.  I had Sunday and Monday off, then worked Tuesday and Wednesday.  Thursday and Friday are off, then Saturday on.  I'm now entering my 'heavy' week as I worked Sunday, have today (Monday) off, but will follow it up by working Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.  On normal pay periods, that last Thursday will be my eight hour shift.  Because there was a holiday this pay period (YAY for getting paid for President's Day!), the eight hour day got moved around a lot and finally ended up on tomorrow (Tuesday).

Now I can't possibly make up my mind on whether I like the 12 hour shifts and its accompanying schedule better or worse than the 8 hour shifts and their accompanying schedule after only working four shifts and having four (now five) days off.  But I can at least share some of my impressions so far.  First, sleep hasn't been as much of an issue as I thought it would be.  Before this schedule started, I normally woke up between five and seven in the morning, and went to bed between eleven pm and one am.   To ensure that I get up in time to go to work I now set my alarm for six am.  That gives me enough sleep, and gets me up with enough time to have a casual cup of coffee, peruse some websites, and get ready for work.  Oddly enough I woke up naturally at five am this morning.  As I didn't have to work, I just got up and assume that I'll take a slight nap later this afternoon... if I had to work I would have rolled over and waited for the alarm to get me out of bed.

Hanging out, Bitch Nurse, and new music

I've come to a realization... I love hanging out with my friends.  This isn't an entirely new realization as I've always known that love to hang out with my friends, but I'm bumping this up my list of things to do.  Two things in particular have opened up my eyes to this.

First was re-connecting with a friend that I met in Truck Driving School.  We both went there not to get a career, but to get a J O B.  Neither of us gave it enough forethought and neither of us turned out to be successful commercial truck drivers.  Out of the 20 or so people in our 'class' and the 10 or so I stayed in touch with after getting a truck driving job, he's the only one that I remained close with.  It helps that we only lived 40 miles apart.  We hung out every other weekend or so after we both re-entered out non truck driving lives.

But after I started nursing school and started working every Sunday morning, we stopped hanging out.  It wasn't a lack of desire to see each other, it was merely a set of conflicting schedules.   The only time that I couldn't hang out was Saturday night.  The only time he had to hang out was Saturday night.  So we drifted apart and only occasionally chatted via text and email.

A couple weeks ago we finally got together and hung out.  We did as most people do and made it an event.  We went to the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.  We had breakfast, drove over in Fiona, hit the show, had dinner in Greek Town, and drove back. The show was completely awesome, and the dinner was fine, but the thing that I'll remember most of the trip is hanging out and chatting with my friend.