Insane and On-Call

See those SUV's? (Otherwise known around here as "Nurse-Mobiles"...) Those are the vehicles of the nurses who are NOT on call this week...

Lucky devils. I, however, am not so lucky this week.

Because I am on call....

WAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

And I'm going slowly bonkers..... I swear, whenever I have to "take call", I get so stressed out that I become completely neurotic. I walk around feeling like I'm losing what little mind I have. Besides being worked to death, I get these absolutely NUTTY, CRAZY, REPETITIVE thoughts that just go round and round and round in my head until I think I'm going INSANE--- and I wonder:

Just WHERE IN THE HELL are these thoughts coming from? Like....are they messages from The Lord?..... Is it telepathy?.... Or is it really what I suspect--that I'm simply going nutty-as-a-fruitcake? For example, ALL DAY LONG today the words to that Roger Miller song kept playing over and over and over in my stupid head: Dang me, dang me, They oughta take a rope and hang me.... Now why in the HELL would that song be playing in my head all day? I was even singing it to myself as I worked in my office, as I fiddled with charts in the conference room, and even while sitting on the toilet in the bathroom. I know people could hear me, but I DIDN'T CARE.... I'm on call--what do I have to lose?

When I get this insane, it affects all aspects of my life. I can't do anything right. I lose things, I trip over nothing, I drop things.... It even makes me knit socks like this:

Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time, okay? Dang me, dang me, They oughta take a rope and hang me.... And I'm irritable as all get out when I'm on call. And to make matters worse, today was boring because most of my patient visits were in town. I always feel confined when I can't get out into the country. I prefer the wide open spaces of the ranches and farms--where nobody can complain about me for singing the Dang Me Song.

But one of the other nurses was off sick today and so I had to see her patients. And all of her patients live in town, mostly in retirement communities. And none of them have any animals I can talk to (except this one patient who has a mean little poodle dog named Boudreau whom I'd dearly love to drop-kick across the goal-post of the football field at Redneck High.) (I didn't say that right--I meant that I'd like to drop-kick the poodle dog-- not the patient.) (I'm mad at that dog because he bit me once in the shin just for pure spite and there was nothing I could do about it--because you can't drop-kick, cuss, stomp, or beat-the-tar-out of your patients' pets in front of them--it's simply not professional.) (You can, however, fantasize about drop-kicking them over goal posts.) God help me, but being on call for an entire week is awful. You get so tired and irritable that your caring Florence Nightingale Personality turns into The Wicked Witch of The West. The whole week is literal hell because you can't relax when you get home after work for fear that the beeper will go off and you'll have to go out on a patient visit in the middle of the night for some godforsaken reason. Or else you don't necessarily have to go out on a visit but you still have to return a patient's phone call--and then you can't go back to sleep. In either case you're so tired from lack of sleep the next day that you can't see straight. And by the end of a full 7 days of sleep deprivation you're ready to be committed to the nearest looney bin.

And with my tentative grip on sanity--well, if I'm not insane BEFORE going on call, I'll certainly be that way AFTER being on call... You'd go insane, too, if you got woken up all night long for calls like this: 8 pm: "Hello, Nurse? I think you need to get over here right away. My left knee has been hurting for the last 3 weeks." 11 pm: "Hello, Nurse? I haven't pooped in 4 days. I feel like I'm sitting on a football. I think it's Fleet's Enema time." 12 am: "Hello, Nurse? This is the Answering Service. We just wanted to call and let you know that Ms. Daylock called to say that she did get her Vitamin B-12 prescription re-filled today for her shot next week." 1 am: "Hello, Nurse? I forgot to tell you something when you were here today." (Note: This horrifying statement will usually elicit an absolute sense of panic and dread in the hapless nurse who hears it. Because I guar-an-damn-tee-ya that it's going to be some godawful thing that could be life-threatening to the patient......) (And then you get so dang irked at the patient for neglecting to tell you about the dangerous symptoms earlier that you just want to holler at them: "I swear, if you die on me I'm going to kill you!"...) (I know that doesn't make sense but it's just how worried & frustrated you get when you've told a beloved patient THREE-ZILLION UMPTEEN-ELEVEN-BILLION TIMES to tell you immediately when they're having life-threatening symptoms!)

2 am: "Hello, Nurse? Is tomorrow when you're coming or is it Thursday?"

3 am: "Hello, Nurse? What does it mean if your left eye waters every single time you go to the bathroom? Why doesn't my right eye water?" 6am: "Hello, Nurse? This is the Answering Service. We have a message for the Administrator. Please tell her that her car mechanic's wife called to say that Buzzy will have her Tahoe ready at about 8am-- and he updated her inspection sticker because it was about to expire so that'll be $12.59 more on the bill. Oh yes, and she left her a bag of biscuits and some apricot jelly she put up last summer on the passenger seat."

I was so tired one morning after a night on call that when I heard the microwave "ding!" to let me know that my sausage-biscuit was ready, I called the Answering Service thinking that the microwave alarm had been my pager going off. I swear I did that. And I left without my biscuit, dang it, STILL not realizing what that bell sound had been...

Dang me, dang me, They oughta take a rope and hang me..... Thinking about drop-kicking that mean little poodle dog got me to thinking about a story my mother told me about my father. She said that when they first got married one of my grandmother's roosters annoyed the hell out of my father for some reason. I don't remember the exact details of the whole story except the part about how one day my father got so pissed off at that rooster that he drop-kicked it across the barn yard. (And the rooster never bothered him again.) Anyway, I was thinking of that rooster story today when I had to go see Miss Griffin and draw her blood. She lives in a trailer park that allows animals. And strangely, when I got there, two of the next-door trailer's big roosters were clucking around her yard. Roosters, I thought. Never took a picture of a rooster.... so why not? They're kind of pretty those roosters, all coloredy-looking and all. So I got out my camera to snap a picture of them. But the little assholes kept running away from me whenever I tried to take their pictures--which made me mad. I stalked those fool chickens for a full half hour, tramping through Miss Griffin's yard in my pinks, getting dirt all over the hems of the pants and dropping my stethoscope in the tomato plants. This made me mad enough to want to drop-kick THEM. Finally I cornered them and got this picture, but I know Miss Griffin thinks I'm completely NUTS --because she saw me and opened her back door. "Get out of my flower bed and why are you taking pictures of those stupid roosters?" she asked. I lied and told her I "make scrapbooks of animal pictures".....

"Roosters ain't animals," she corrected me. "They're fowl--for breeding biddies." WHATEVER. I drew her blood, delivered it to the lab, and then went back to the office, thinking I'd sulk the rest of the day in my office. But when I got back they told me I had to turn right around and go out to see another patient at the Fairfield Ranch.

FREEDOM!!!! Hello, Cows! Hello, Horses! I'm back!......

At last--I could once again roam the countryside and see all my friends! And out on the Fairfield Ranch there's decent, sensible animals that I don't want to drop-kick. Like this sweet little nanny-goat who loves me so much that she always tries to come with me when it's time for me to leave:

As I said goodbye to her and walked away reluctantly, I thought I heard a faint, familiar bleating....and I thought I could make out the words....the words of a nanny-goat singing......

Dang me, dang me, they oughta take a rope and hang me.....

I only have to take "on-call" for one week.....that's all...just one week.... seven days... surely I can make it... yes, I can make it.....Please Lord help me make it......