My Ego's Fallen And It Can't Get Up

I've told myself repeatedly that if this is the extent of the 'problems' I face in my life in a week, then all told, life is pretty damned good.

Having said that, I can't resist a few rants:

Within minutes of arriving to my assigned work area Tuesday night, the lab computer system became inaccessible and inoperable. And I happened to be partnered with Our Lady of Perpetual Medical Leaves. 'Oh noooo, we should start using Downtime Procedures,' she Eeyores about 60 seconds after one or two unsucessful attempts to get a connection. 'Why don't we wait a few minutes and see exactly what's going on before we decide if we need to take drastic measures,' I growl. Or something like that. Well. Two and a half hours later we are still floundering with manually programming tests and shoving written ER orders into various piles. Three large hospitals are involved with this system failure/growing catastrophe. Our so-called Downtime Procedure Manual has not been updated: it's 5 years old and full of useless, non-scannable labels and former computer system information. I literally and figuratively toss these Procedures aside.

I happen to refresh ONE MORE time, and finally get connected to Millenium. Yay, we're up! But wait, there's more. Our system and the system used for ordering and viewing by the rest of the hospital...they ain't talking. So we have no way of checking on what's actually ordered, and the docs and nurses have no way of seeing any of the patient results we've put in. But we don't realize this right away. More floundering ensues. Every 30 seconds someone is coming into the ER lab door to drop off more specimens(sometimes with written orders, sometimes not). Or to ask 'Do you have results on so-and-so?'. Or to announce they can't find lab labels for their specimens. While the phone is ringing off the hook. I have not felt this unprepared or incompetent since I don't know when.

Our Lady of Perpetual Medical Leaves is not very organized. At least to my way of thinking. I have to ask her to separate our copies of lab work away from the copies we are setting out for distribution for the ER staff. To staple all labwork to the req slip from one patient (which she doesn't do). Pretty basic stuff.

After 5 solid hours of frantic paper shuffling, manual programming, test running, stapling, copying, phone answering, no lunch, no break (except for a mad dash to the bathroom), help walks in the door. The phlebotomy/Lab Outreach supervisor (yes, a crisis bad enough to page supervisors) has called in one of the first shift techs two hours early to come in. All three of us work incessantly for the next two hours until everything was cleaned up, including silly things I had forgotten or erroneously not programmed. A couple instrument interfaces still were not functioning, but everything else seemed to be fixed.

I had been on my feet for 7.5 hours (except for the bathroom break, and only because I have girl plumbing). No food. No drink. I later found out a safety report was written up on us for delayed transfusion testing.

My coworker? I heard later she bitched about me to our supervisor because I was 'nitpicking' on her.

I will say that I was not the one who kept saying 'SHIT!!' or yelled at the coagulation analyzer when it wouldn't run what we programmed. I remember thinking she reminds me of mom in the old days...



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That cake I made for my own birthday? That multimedia concoction I made out of my 'Death by Chocolate' cookbook? The one that required 5 different components, several culinary techniques, and took 3 days to make? The dessert that was created and executed by pastry chefs? That would probably cost $10-12 if served at the Trellis restaurant today? That's what I entered in the Dessert Contest for our Lab Week festivities.

A shoo-in, you say? Oh, thanks *blushes from imagined flattery*. Well, based on history, I think not. You see, before I even decided to submit it, I knew good and well that it would just be one more entry in a large field of varied desserts. And that it may well not win. Taste is a very subjective thing. And nothing I have submitted in the years before has even placed in the top three. I had gone to the trouble because I wanted to make this for ME. Lab week just happened to take place after my birthday, and they were getting the leftovers (5 slices in a container, garnished with candied violets to boot).

And I was right.

The winning entry was a gooey chocolate cake featuring a boxed cake mix. The other two entries were cakes featuring peanut butter. In a dismayingly small field of eight entries (we've had twenty-something other years).

Wednesday night I beheld the crumb-strewn, chocolate-smeared sticky wreckage of the dessert table. My container sat open and empty like a raided tomb, the mocha rum sauce at the bottom bearing the graphic stripe print of many spoon scrapings. "Your dessert was really good!' piped a not-so-favorite first shifter the next morning. "Well, it couldn't have been that bad," I agreed. Our front desk person later told me before she could even announce the winners that room was packed with first-shifters wanting a piece of the sugary feeding frenzy. Why hadn't mine won, she asked. Too 'Dessert Noir'? I answered with shrug.

I am eternally grateful to my coworker Sue who painted a probably correct picture of the palate of our Lab Director (one of the two judges). "Listen to me," she says. "'Go-Daddy' (her nickname for him because he is the father of 5 young children) has probably been subsisting for years on peanut butter, Froot-Loops, chicken nuggets, and macaroni and cheese out of a box. THAT'S the bar you're aiming for."

Thoughts of submitting limburger brownies next year, or a cake (boxed mix, of course) with an eggshell 'accidentally' broken into it, full of pieces of the cheapest, waxiest pseudo-chocolate I can procure from the after-Easter candy markdowns, and baked for about an hour at 450 F have randomly popped into my mind the last few days. Completely randomly.



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I hate things about my body that apparently do not bend to my will. Female issues being one of them. I will only say that the lack thereof the last few months had me convinced that the finish line was in sight. I had a good thing going.

Nope, sorry. Red flag. And all the bodily discomfort that goes with it. How rude.



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I do not generally crave ice cream (with the possible recent exception of the Double Mocha Madness ice cream in my Caramel Rum Delirium Ice Cream Cake). So when I see 'Ice Cream Social' as the featured Lab Week activity/food-fest for Thursday, I think 'big hairy-ass deal'. Last thing I need calorie-wise after a self-indulgent birthday week.

Well...yeah, it IS a big hairy-ass deal when you think about this: a number of third shifters plonked down donated cash, or took a lot of time to make items to sell at the fundraising bake sale (10 loaves of cinnamon swirl bread? Hello?!!) The sale that was specifically designated to raise money for Lab Week activities and foods. I've heard reports of between $600 and $800.

Where did all that money go? That's a hell of a lot of ice cream and sprinkles.

And when you come into work the night of said activity, and find an industrial-sized ice cream bucket scraped empty in the break room wastebasket; messy remnants of perishable toppings left in cans at room temperature on the same crumb-strewn chocolate-smeared table; and hear all this was consumed by first shift only, hear the same dejected comments from your shift-mates, and think how familiar this is from years past...yeah, it becomes a big deal.

And the table full of 'prizes' labeled with employees' names? I seriously thought it was a collection of garage sale leftovers. We were tittering like schoolgirls as we were leaving, checking out the very obviously vendor freebies. Pencils, pens, a large dental insurance company's plastic toothpicks, a terry cloth sweat band (!), a thin tote bag, key chains, candle-holders, etc.

Again, where did all that money go? My coworker Sue suggested we ask for an itemized list of all lab week expenses. I thought it was an excellent idea, and passed it on to our supervisor, who says he will get us this information.

In the meantime, complaining year after year will do us no good. Boycotting Lab Week altogether seems a bit passive aggressive (although temptingly satisfying). Leaving the country worked quite well for me one year. I also suggested we take a more active role in solving the demoralizing problem of being left out of the celebratory banquets. I think it's time I put my money (or cake or cinnamon swirl bread) where my mouth is. Too late for this year, but next year...