The Post-Lunchbreak Desk

One thing I'll sorta miss as an ICU clerk is that my desk or station (and I get my own) is the hub of all the unit activity—the pharmacy and laboratory tube stations are there, the phone, computers, the pharmacy fax machine, the regular fax machine, and usually half or all the patient charts are there. Usually I try to manage all this randomness in somewhat of an orderly fashion, but those agents of chaos, nurses and physicians, are constantly at my desk—throwing charts around, trying to find patient labels, looking for medicines, rifling through all the papers on the printer, thumping the side of the fax machine, etc.

So you can imagine what it looks like when I go to break and the staff are free to play at my desk for half of an hour. I'll come back to a bottle of pee in a biohazard bag, three or four open pneumatic tubes (which are the size of footballs), charts thrown open, the phone off the hook, some tubes of blood, bags of IV medication all over the place, three phone lines blinking on hold, and a note saying the printer is broken. Usually a nurse runs up and exclaims how they've been dying since I was gone.

I feel sort of like the mother hen of the unit; I feel like a housewife coming back from vacation to a house occupied by a hapless husband and sons.