Tuesday, June 23, 2009

And the blogs were silent

Ok, maybe a little over-dramatic. It's been about a week since I posted, I promise to get back at it. In addition to the funeral last week, my wife went in for back surgery. So I spent Friday-Monday sitting at the hospital with her.

The surgery went well and she was able to walk some and even take on steps. We're home and she's made it up the stairs to our room (hopes to make it back down today). She continues to progress and gain strength.

We had an interesting experience at the hospital ("interesting experience" and "hospital" probably shouldn't be in the same sentence). This hospital is relatively new (1-2 years) and ONLY does surgeries. They have NO emergency room. No Pediatric ward. No Labor & Delivery. ONLY surgeries. Mostly hips & knees, but other miscellaneous surgeries too (I wish had more information on that).

There are two floors active - one for administrative, X-Rays, Labs, etc, one for surgery and patient rooms. The third floor is built out, but has not yet been used. There is a fourth floor, but it's not built out yet. There are 36 patient rooms on the second floor.

Since these type surgeries are elective and can be scheduled, they tend to be scheduled early in the week. Doctors don't want to be on call on weekends. In our case, we went in on Friday. So the hospital was less than full capacity. In fact, for part of the weekend, there were eight patients, for the rest there were only four. During one "event" in our room (sounds ominous - it wasn't) we had 100% of the on-duty hospital nursing staff in our room - two nurses and a nurse supervisor.

I was VERY impressed with the way everything was handled. Job separation was very fluid among the nursing staff, various levels of nurses, even housekeeping. If you needed something, it got done. No one said "I'll have to call someone else, that's not my job".

But the world moves on, and a lot happened while I was out. I'm going to catch up on my blog reading and news reading and post more this week. Oh and there's that silly thing called a job, whereby I work a little here and there and my employer sends me a little money (not enough) here and there.

More to come...