WORK!

I have been working a lot. The past couple of pay checks have been fairly good, since I have been working more than forty hours a week, but the work has been tiring. If anyone missed the memo (you know the one that stayed at the top of this blog for over a month at the beginning of the year), I have been working in Ochsner Clinic Foundation’s inpatient pharmacy. I have also moved—I am now living in New Orleans! If you are familiar with the city, my apartment is in Mid-City.

With the new job I have had to learn a new vocabulary, which is most apparent in the I.V. Room, where we prepare I.V.’s (what a creative name for a room, huh). My second night of training, I overheard the girl training me tell a nurse whom she was talking to on the phone that she couldn’t help her because she would, “have to get undressed to go talk to the pharmacist.” The next day that I trained in the I.V. room, a different female was training me and asked me if anyone had shown me how “to make the babies yet?”

The vocabulary is certainly not what it seems. In the I.V. Room, you are dressed if you have are wearing the required attire, which includes gown, shoe covers, hat, and mask, over your scrubs. When you take these outer garments off, you are then undressed. When someone refers to “making babies,” they are probably referring to making I.V. solutions of a standard concentration for the neonatal I.C.U. so the nurses can draw up the I.V. in a syringe and administer it quickly.

I am also learning interesting facts about the hospital. I noticed very early (like in the first 15 minutes on the first day) that there are red light switches in the bathrooms. I wondered why, and a few weeks later I was reading something placed on a wall and learned that electrical items marked with red (like light switches and outlets) are connected to the generator and have back-up power. Think of how great it is to know that if the lights go out, I will not be in the dark in the bathroom at work.

Well, that’s all the time I have for now, so e-mail or call me if you are coming to New Orleans. I’ll let you take me out and show me a good time.