luck of the draw

I have a unique job in many ways. One of the more interesting aspects of my work is that the fate of my day not only rests in my attitude but also on a bit of luck. When the nurses on my unit sit down to hear report in the morning, we also pick a poker chip out of a bag. The chips in the bag range from #1 to #17. I have a little ritual of shaking the bag up and down and waiting for the right feeling before I pick a chip. My method of chip picking is highly unscientific and while on the weeks that I get number 1 or a single digit, I secretly think that I have a secret power and become convinced that I am telepathic. On other weeks, I just think that I have bad luck. Let me elucidate a bit.

If you pick chip number 1, your likelihood of having one patient who is fairly sick and interesting is quite good. Your day will most likely consist of some pretty interesting nursing care and procedures. If you pick chip number 17, the likelihood of taking care of 2 patients who have been there for a really long time, who have developed some hospital acquired bugs and therefor are in isolation, who are total care because they happen to be parapalegic or who are really mobile because they shouldn't be in the ICU anymore and are waiting for a bed on the regular floor but think that you are their personal slave....is much more likely.

As you can probably guess from the way that I am writing this, today was a Chip 17 kind of day. I thought my hand circles in the bag were going to bring me good luck at chip picking but I was sadly,sadly wrong. The funny thing was that today was a rare occasion where I drove to work and as I was walking down this corridor from the parking lot to the hospital entrance with a bunch of other nurses and I thought in my head, "We are like soldiers going to the battlefield, some of us will have good days and others of us will have crappy ones and it is all based on luck". Well actually I don't think it is all based on luck, attitude plays such an enormous role in the success of a nurse (or really any professional).

Now that I am home and able to reflect on my day,it really wasn't that bad. Yes I did have two busy patients but that wasn't what made the day hard. My heart just wasn't in it today. Actually I remember trying to stay awake in report and thinking, "I don't think I've ever felt this tired at work before". I felt like a sensitive slug all day. The nice thing was that no one died (which happens often at my work) and the family member of one of my patient's said 'thank-you' to me at the end of the day. You have no idea how much that means. It is so simple, just one word but no matter how hard the day was, if a patient or their family member is able to acknowledge the hard work that we are all doing to make them better and says 'thank-you' there is a silver lining at the end of it all.