Charisma from the Nursing agency sent me back to Sunshine Retirement Village today. I’ve not been there since a resident died in my care – it was my first death as a nurse and it will stay with me forever.  Anyway, off I trotted to my old familiar stomping ground, secretly hoping that they had missed me and less secretly hoping that it was bacon and eggs for breakfast. The manager hates wasting food, so always insists we eat what is left.  She also guilt trips us into donating something to the residents’ fund (fair enough). But with Christmas approaching I think I will have to donate my uniform and get a bigger one.  As usual the home and all its beds remain full but we had a new nursing resident called Mrs A. She has been living there for just over a week. According to the handover and her care records she has a long medical history including dementia and apparently she is also a Walker, a Wanderer and a Feeder (amongst other things). I almost choked. You might r...

I’ve missed my bus home after my nursing shift tonight , but to be honest I don’t care. Nursing is such an emotional rollercoaster and t oday has got to have been the best and worst day in my nursing career to date. A resident in my care died . I hope that I was able to help to make her passing into a peaceful journey. It was an expected death. We had been expecting her to die for a couple of weeks but it still doesn’t make it easy when it happens. Her family were there, all crowded round her bedside and her poor husband looked so broken. I think it was the sight of them all crying over her that made me take charge, as I really felt like I needed to look after each and every one of them too. Two weeks ago I had been working the afternoon shift when Mrs S had what the care staff called a ‘funny turn’. It turned out that she had had a huge stroke, so we tucked her up into bed and one of the girls stayed with her to stop her feeling so frightened. She had already s...

I should have known it was going to be one of those weeks. It started when I walked into the office to submit my timesheets and there was Charisma having a meltdown. Sitting at her desk head down and chanting ‘no nurses, no nurses, no nurses’ over and over again. I won’t lie, a little bit of wee came out when she lifted her head to look at me – she was physically frothing at the mouth. I rushed over thinking that she needed some medical attention, only to find that she had popped her daily dose of Berocca directly into her mouth instead of dispersing it in water. We cleaned her up and sat down with a cuppa while she offloaded about the shortage of nurses. Me being me (aka idiot), said that I was happy to do a few more shifts if it would help her out. She soon brightened up at that and gave me a fortnight rota for a place I’d never been to before…Knutton Mansions. When I arrived, I was greeted at the door with ‘Hi! My name’s Charlie – I’m your knickers for the day...

I think the honeymoon period with this nursing agency is over. If I was a paranoid person I would think that the ever charming Charisma had contacted the Manager at Sunshine and said something like ‘that Florence is far too fat, I’ve still got her size 10 uniform here that she has failed to get into, so work her like a donkey… because she certainly looks like one’. As always, I’m sitting on this damn bus and I would kick my shoes off for a bit of relief but I’m not sure that I’d get them back on. Can haggis get pregnant? If they can then that’s my feet. I’d best not kick them off anyway…the smell would paralyse the driver and I’m just not up to driving a bus home tonight. I arrived at Sunshine this morning and all I can say is, thank God for Rita. And thank God we have been working a lot better together lately after our little talk . The Manager told me that she had to go out that morning to assess a few patients so I would have to attend the weekly MDT meeting. Not a ...

There’s always that one carer in every nursing home isn’t there? Or in my case there’s a whole bunch of them! I’m back at the Sunshine Retirement Village (Charisma called it my quarterly bonus) and I was quite excited to see all the residents and the staff again. Well in the case of the staff that lasted all of five minutes after handover. For reasons known only to them, they had decided to punish me for my absence for the past few weeks. How did I know this? The long silences, sideways glances and no break allocated for me of course! I had a think about how to approach it while I did the morning meds. Thankfully the residents hadn’t been informed of the punishment conspiracy and they all seemed pleased to see me. It took a while longer to do the medication round as most people wanted to chat and I seemed to get caught up in adjusting stockings and untangling rollers from hair, but it didn’t matter, I would just start the dinner time meds a little later. By the end of the ...

Being sent to different nursing homes is starting to become the normal way of working now. Charisma from the nursing agency has sent me somewhere different again; and so I’m getting used to starting from scratch every few shifts. This time it was on a unit in a ‘challenging behaviour’ home she was sending me to, and I could almost feel her glee as she imagined them chewing me up and spitting me out. She likes to label does our Charisma, what with her 'EMI' and her 'challenging behaviour', maybe the agency ought to send her on a course labelled 'Challenging ignorance – for dummies who misjudge other people’? So I arrived at this new nursing home and as usual headed straight up to the nurses office. My welcome could only be described as frosty, as this huge bear of a man, wearing a belt full of keys like a prison warden, looked at me in surprise for what seemed like a full minute. He then proceeded to bark at me in a confused way asking who the hell I wa...

Charisma from the agency rang me at the last minute yesterday and instead of my usual rota asked me to do a shift at a different nursing home. When I say ‘asked’ it was kind of in the same way an armed robber would ask for the contents of the bank safe; but other than that I really feel that me and Charisma are starting to bond through these friendly phone calls. I won’t lie, I was a bit nervous about going somewhere else after being at Sunshine Nursing Home for so many weeks. I was just starting to get used to who and where everything was there; and I think they are getting used to me a little too. After the episode with Mrs G and the bath I feel like the carers are starting to see me as one of them, they even allocate me a break now! I think the incident with Mr F and his recycled maltesers also gave me more credibility in the eyes of the carers, but that’s a story for another day, preferably not until long after I’ve got back on the horse and been able to pop a few ch...