1. My boss is a moron.
2. My boss is a fucking moron.
Seriously: You should have more than six months' experience as a working nurse before anybody gives you a managerial job, no matter how brilliant an organizer or genuinely nice a person you are.
Because, if you have some experience on the floor or in the unit or in a clinic, you would not:
1. Double the number of patients in my unit without warning and without giving me any extra resources.
2. Look at me like a calf at a new gate when I suggest that those of us who might be administering chemo (there is no policy as yet) will have to get and maintain competency, and, given that chemo is an entirely different specialty, that this might be a big deal.
I walked in today to find eight patients and two nurses, which doesn't seem like a big deal, until you remember that these patients are in a critical-care setting, we are doing total care on people who are hemiplegic, altered as hell, and tend to have rapid neuro changes, and there weren't even enough monitors for the patients we had. One of them was on a not-centrally-monitored ancient thing somebody dug out of a basement storage room.
This is, as of yesterday at noon, the new policy: fill all the beds imaginable with all the patients we can get, until something breaks. We were damned, damned lucky today that nothing broke. The guy who lingered on the edge of crumping managed not to crump, the woman who has a violent history with us and was actually labelled as a "Do Not Return" (she was admitted by mistake) managed not to punch anyone, and we got through the day.
Then in the middle of the day, Bossman comes to me to chat about the whole deal, and I bring up the "Oh, by the way, you're also going to be giving chemo" thing. He truly did not understand why maintaining competency would be a big deal. "There are protocols and regimens in books this thick," I said, holding my thumb and forefinger about three inches apart. He had no idea. I am not a chemo nurse, and *I* knew that shit, just from being around it.
Now I am going to drink. Maybe not a lot, and maybe not hard liquor, but I am going to drink. With any luck, it'll mellow me out enough that I don't end up staying up late and writing letters to the medical director, the state board of nursing, the state board of morons, and the paper.
Holy. Crapping. MONKEYS.