Wednesday morning – I haven’t been to work since the weekend. How much could possibly change in two days?
I stride down the hall from the parking ramp, lost in thought in another world. Suddenly, the hall turns right and trails down a corridor that I have never traveled before. Where am I? Oh yes, I remember seeing a sign last week posted to the main hallway sidewall that stated, “Hallway to be closed on May 24.” Precipitously a new hall has appeared. The only choice is to keep moving forward and see where this passageway comes out. I feel like I am completely in another world physically as well as mentally. I turn this way and that, not recognizing anything. My brain is confused. Did I park my car in the wrong ramp this morning for I am hiking down hallways that sport appointment desks, waiting rooms, bathrooms, and decorated sidewalls? Where did all this come from? Eventually, after an endless walk, I come back out to an intersection where my brain is able to finally say, “Ah, yes, I can go back to my non-alert state.” Apparently, behind all that plastic lining the other old hallway for the last year or so has been growing another clinic building.
I change into scrubs and head down to the operating rooms to begin breaks for my fellow nurse anesthetists as I always do. Somewhere during those first couple of hours, I arrive at the realization that what used to be the recovery room has also closed during my two days away and a new recovery room has opened. This new facility has small individual rooms for each patient while the old one was a large open room with clusters of bays for patient care. It is a modern work of art. I even have to scan out with my name badge to get back to the operating room suite. Strange. Are they afraid the patients are going to make an escape back to the OR?
Here again, my brain struggles to figure out the new rules. Does everyone go to this new recovery room? Or do some patients go to what we call “the far east” which currently serves as the pre-operative area? And who decides? Within the first 30 minutes, my pager goes off telling me that “Patient John Doe is to go to the east pacu postoperatively.” That is an odd page. And why am I getting it, I wonder? I am not this patient’s anesthetist. And where does this page originate from? No one seems to have an answer to my questions.
As a final addition to all this change, a change has also been made as to how some of our drugs are packaged. They look different and they are harder to distinguish one from the other. I have worked here for 29 years but today, I think I unknowingly got off the wrong bus at the wrong hospital. I just don’t remember doing so. Maybe that is how Alzheimer’s works.
farmgirlwriter 