Improvement and Drama

Every day, the visits get easier and easier to do.  See, I have a fair amount of social anxiety, to put it mildly, and sitting down and chatting with my patients can be really hard for me.  The technical nursing stuff?  No problem.  Answering questions they ask me–piece of cake.  Small talk about the weather: oh god, kill me now.  As I posted previously, my first visit was incredibly ackward.   However, things are getting smoother.  Today I ran two visits, and both went quite well–I got everything covered with a minimum of long silences.

And then, after my two visits, the drama started.  First, we saw a patient who had an absolutely warring family–his child said that the patient’s wife was abusive, hysterical, and controlling.  The patient’s wife said their son was abusive, hysterical, and controlling.  The wife says he has a month left to live.  The son says the wife is cancelling appointments.  And on, and on, and on.  The planned 30-minute visit took us two hours to sort everything out.

Taking two hours at that house made us late to our next patient, a hospice patient with horrible pain on a CADD pump.  This patient is a medical provider, and has thrice called in his own prescriptions–including one for Ativan.  Trying to tell him, “No, X, you can’t do that,” has gotten us nowhere.  All we can do is call his attending whenever he does it and update that doctor, but it’s starting to get a little frustrating.

Drama, drama, drama.  Tomorrow I see three patients, including one whom I remember from the ICU.  Should be interesting…