COUNT DOWN!

This is a paper chain taped to my kitchen cupboard to countdown my 11 remaining shifts of work.

I think I'm anxious to be done for many reasons:
1. When I'm done I'll have our baby relatively soon
2. Working nights and these 12 hour shifts is kicking my trash as I get bigger and more and more tired
3. Work has been really crappy lately

To expound reason #3-work being crappy lately, it's mainly been due to weird assignments lately. Last week I got there and they told me I was to be the nurses aid on 4th floor. This assignment equals hell to me. There are a plethora of reasons I chose NOT to go to nursing school and all the major ones would be manifest being the pooper scooper in hell hall. Plus I'm 8 months pregnant and all the lifting required was not going to happen.
Thankfully my boss intervened and told them no way due to the pregnancy...so instead they assigned me to babysit a crazy guy. There are a few problems with this. First, in my place, they had a nurse take her ICU patients and just do my job on top of hers...which means no one does my job unless the phone rings. So poor patient care for anyone with a heart monitor on that night. Secondly, to babysit a crazy person is to make sure they don't get out of bed. I thought I proved myself worthless at this the week earlier when a nurse in the ICU asked me to watch her crazy patient.
That incident he was 60 and crazy and saw no one was in the room and went to break for it, but his IV's caught him and he went spiraling back and fell on his hands and knees. When he stood up I was yelling to sit down as I started walking into the room, at the time he began to loose his balance and eventually fall, I was probably 6' away. Rather than dive or even run to save him, I just watched him fall, then I did help him up. So they all saw I selfishly thought of myself before the patients with that incident, and I was surprised they wanted me to do this again.
So I went up and walked in the room and I knew this dude...we'll call him Bill...from his stay in the ICU and he was crazy then, but less mobile. I groaned knowing this would be a long 12 hours.
The first few hours weren't too bad. I just sat next to him and watched TV, he actually took a nap. I hoped he'd sleep all night and I could just catch up on all the network television I'd been missing for 2 years. But then the sun went down, and the crazy came up with Bill. Oh...to preface this, the night before he didn't have a babysitter and had managed to get out of bed and fell, smashing his eye on something and had a 2" suture above his eyebrow to outline his black eye. I had all four of the side rails up on his bed, and the most he could do would fling his leg over one rail, and I would just fling it back into the bed. But later the House Supervisor came and told me I had to keep the bottom two rails down because that was considered a restraint.
So down came the rails and out came Bill's legs. At one point I let him sit on the edge of the bed, but he started leaning forward, so I shoved him back and adjusted the bed into a pike position, so his knees were up. He was pretty mad throughout all of this, cursing at me and calling me names and telling me where to go and on and on. But the pike positions was awesome. It would take all his energy to sit up and lean on his elbow, he'd stare at me, run out of breath (major smoker) and collapse back into the bed. For 5 hours he did this. He'd get really mad, swear at me like a sailor, and even try to spit at me, but he was so weak, he ended up just spitting all over himself. He also refused to wear his gown, and after putting it on twice, I just left it off and covered him with a blanket. His nurse didn't mind and he eventually kicked it off when he was mad, so he lay there totally naked. I'd ask if he was cold and he would snort and say: "Course not." OK. I guess it made sense since he was getting a full work out trying to get out of bed.
I just sat back and watched TV until 3 am, as he did his monster crunches naked, and then I turned the TV off to hopefully help him get some sleep.
He was hallucinating all night too, pretending to smoke, asking me all sorts of questions, the best being:
Bill: "Are you going to go sleep with Dan tonight?" (Earlier hallucinations established Dan as his brother). Me: "Nope. I'm going home to sleep with my husband."
Bill: "That lump on your gut got a baby in it?" Me: "Yes. This gut is actually a baby."
Bill: "What you say we go outside for a smoke?" Me: "No way. It's freezing outside. Plus you can't even walk. Remember you cut your head open last night?"
Bill: "I didn't cut my head." Me: "Feel up on your eye. Those stitches weren't put in for no reason. You are too weak to get out of bed, you'll fall. So no smoking outside for you. Sorry." Bill: "You don't know anything you stupid *&$^#!!." I just rolled my eyes and turned the page of my magazine...Bill: "So you ready to go outside yet?"

After a while of sitting in the dark in silence, Bill began to scheme. I had been listening to him for 10 hours at this point. I was kind of staring into nothing when a row of stitches slowly raised above the top of the bed rail. A sliver of light from the hall shown over his snotty eye as it emerged under the bushy eyebrow, staring at me in the darkness. It reminded me of Edgar Allen Poe's short story, A Tell-Tale Heart where a crazy person murders an old man with a glass eye. At that point I felt Bill could die and I wouldn't mind, and he whispered: "You asleep?" I shot back:"Of course I'm not asleep I've got to sit here and make sure you don't get out of bed." Bill:"You look tired. You should go to sleep." Me: "Bill, I'm not going to sleep. Actually I only have 2 more hours and you'll have a new babysitter so you are the one that should get some sleep." More cursing and another collapse of exhaustion into his bed. I was never so glad to see the clock strike 6am than that morning when Bill and I could part ways.

His nurse thanked me as I left and said I'd been really therapeutic for him. The image of an old man, totally nude, spitting on himself, panting for breath, and cursing in anger flashed in my mind, and seemed the complete opposite of therapeutic. But then I was even more shocked the next night when I got to work (thankfully doing my real job) and the House Supervisor said Bill had asked if I could come back that night again since we got along so well before.
I guess when you're crazy you have a weird sense of getting along with someone.

Since my night with Bill I've had the paper chain counting down...now only 11 shifts left!