Saturday, February 21, 2009

Six month anniversary

Last night I got together with some of my classmates to celebrate six months of being Masters! We had a great time catching up and supporting each other in our career challenges and aspirations. Michiko came all the way from Japan! Since our class has such a cool graduation date: 080808, we decided to get together on our anniversary: 080809.

The fun part of my job

The educator half of my job is the most creative and fun. It's the part that meets the need to nurture the next generation. We hold a critical care symposium every year. This is the first year I have been on the planning committee. (Confession: I joined after all the work was done. Don't think I"ll get away with that next year.)

Anyway, this is the first year we have had poster presentations. We have 3 hospitals in our system. We had a total of 5 posters: one from the hospital in Glendora, one from Covina, and [BRAG] three from my units! The first picture is of Ruby and RZ, a husband-wife team who created a poster on prevention of hospital acquired infection from central lines (a type of IV). Ruby works in the DOU (a step down from critical care) and RZ works in ICU. They both work the night shift. They are leaders.

This is a picture of some night shift nurses from CCU with me. They are the stars of a poster on Core Measures. One of the night shift nurses developed a simple form to help nurses be sure we are meeting all the marks. It was intended to be for our 4 units. However, administration liked it so much that it is now being used in all 3 hospitals! How could I not be proud of our nurses!



This is a picture of Gail, one of our night shift
nurses in DOU, explaining his team's poster on preventing the development of pressure ulcers.

This is a shot of some of our nurses who attended the critical care symposium Thursday. You can see they made me sit front and center. How embarrassing! I am so proud of them!

Sunday, February 15, 2009

There's a New Place in Town

Last night I went to Piano Piano, a new place in town. It is a dueling piano show that really gets the audience going. The show is totally based on audience requests. Teams of 2 to 4 musicians take requests from the audience and tips can determine how quickly they get played or if a song gets killed altogether.

They got these two guys to come up and dance in front of the crowd by promising them a free drink. (I hate it when pictures disappear. The guys were pretty funny.)This lady being serenaded by one of the piano players was celebrating her 86th birthday. Of course, her family went wild. Gave me thoughts about two 87th birthdays coming up.
As the night wore on, it got pretty lively. You can see we were sitting on the "party side." Defintely an entertaining evening!

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Another twin story

Last evening when I got off work, I stopped by Long's drug store

(recently bought out by CVS; this I know from my son, Matthew, who works at Long's in Fresno [and BRAG: was named "Employee of the Quarter" after his first quarter on the job!])

to pick up Mom's meds.

Mom has a lot of meds so it takes awhile to process the order. I asked the clerk to change the tops to the non-childproof type, so it took even longer. The clerk and I had a chance to chat. I told her Mom's birthday is coming up. She will be 87. Her birthday is on 2-22-22! The clerk was delighted and reached under the counter. She pulled out "2" pens and "2" pill containers for her!

Then I told the clerk Mom is a twin. There are "2" of them! "Two" with the birthday "2-22-22"! The clerk immediately reached back under the counter and pulled out "2" more pens and "2" more pill containers for her twin!

When I got to the twins' house and told them the story, then pulled out the "2" gifts, both were absolutely delighted! They were thrilled to receive these simple gifts!

PS. If I was a real blogger, I'd have had my camera with me and taken a picture of the "2" of them.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Weekend with the twins

Shopping for groceries at Stater Brothers. It rained as we got home. The plan was to go out to Riverside for lunch. Aunt Dorothy would like to see Uncle Gene's grave. She's so cute. She said they didn't leave enough room for her! The gravestones are all too close together. She will have to be cremated.
The rain interfered with those plans. We'll have to go another day.
Aunt Dorothy insisted I get in the picture too!

Snow in Covina!

It's always so pretty after a rain. This morning I took this shot as I pulled out of the driveway leaving for work.

It started getting gray when I got to West Covina. This shot was taken passing the West Covina Fashion Plaza.
The sun came out again. This is the parking lot behind the hospital. The white tower is full of liquid oxygen.

I had to go over to our other campus in Covina, Inter-Community for a meeting.








Palm trees for those who miss them.

The Covina campus.









Getting off work tonight, the snow level was down to 2000 ft. The mountains were all white! Impressive. Beautiful. Hard to see in this shot, but by the time I got up high enough, it was too dark for another picture. Big Bear had over 2 feet. Two more storms are headed our way. Well, we sure need the rain. Last week it was 80 degrees!

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Change

We got a new CEO two months ago. That's a good thing. I was ready to change buses. This guy is taking our bus in a new direction. He is taking us back to good!

I just heard today that our Chief Nurse Executive is gone! Even though I agree with this decision, it takes my breath away. Like a gut punch. Twenty of the top administrators got their pink slips. Things are shakin'.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

One of those disappearing photos

Atlantic Coast Highway

I called Christie this morning. Noel answered. Christie is not home. She is in Raleigh visiting her friend, Mel. That girl gets around! She and her friends always meet in a different city!

Anyway, Noel remarked that I haven't updated my blog since I was in Georgia. Right! I have been wanting to. So here goes...
A strange site for us Pacific coasters. Even Christie says she is still not used to seeing the Atlantic Coast Highway!





This is the part where I tell you about my visit starting with a relaxing morning on the Burgdorf's front porch. Unfortunately, the other photos I uploaded have disappeared!




Well, I am frustrated at trying to blog. About a gadzillion photos that I uploaded to blog about disappear as I try to write! And I certainly can't arrange them on the page once they are uploaded! Even when I try to move a tiny photo into a huge white space it won't move. Then when I look for the rest of the photos I uploaded, they are gone!!

So I am certainly not finding this a user friendly site! This makes it hard to convince Christie and Noel to assist Cayleigh and Aiden to blog. Even if it does help their creativity and story telling skills!

Any tips to help me would certainly be motivating. As it is, I am not sure how much future blogging I will do. Unless I upload the photos one at a time I guess.

So I will post another blog with the family shot of Christie, Noel and the kids.

This is my friend, Karen. I am sure you all remember her. We met when Christie was about 4 and her daughter, Jessica, was in Little Church with Christie. Then, when the girls were in St Christopher's School, we were much younger than the other mothers in the class so we ended up hanging out together. Karen also has a daughter one year younger than Christie and Jessica, April. Then she has a gap like I do.

Her son, Jeffrey, went to school with Joseph. Jeffrey is the one that was born with a major heart defect and ended up in Janet's unit at Children's Hospital with major heart surgeries. He also had to have a pacemaker placed while he was a teenager. Fortunately, Janet's team did a great job! Jeff is doing great! Living a normal life! In fact, he has a young man's dream job: playing video games for a living. He is a beta tester for one of the game developers!

Anyway, when Jeff was born with all his medical problems, Karen needed a nurse to translate when she went to visit the doctors. Enter me. Well, Karen ended up going to nursing school and becoming a nurse herself. She and I started the BSN journey together in the 90's. Karen finished in the 90's. I finished in 2006.

I continued on to the Master's program. Karen did too. We both finished our Master's in August of last year. However, when I finished, I was finished. Karen took a much more difficult route. She is now a Nurse Practitioner! She called me last Thursday to tell me she passed her state boards! Above is a picture of Karen standing by the door of the office she shares with the physician she now practices with. The empty space on the door is where her name will be very shortly!
And here we are celebrating!
This is what I have been busy with lately. I had to renew my BLS and ACLS as they expired at midnight last night. So Thursday night after work for 3 hours I was in class renewing Basic Life Support and yesterday, Saturday, I spent the entire day renewing Advanced Cardiac Life Support. We do not get paid for doing this. It is a "condition of employment." Unfortunately, we renew in the month they expire, we can't work without them, and the renewals weren't offered until the end of the month. Nothing like waiting until the last minute!

Hey, I'm lucky to have a job in today's economy. And fortunately, I love my job!