All this Jahi Mc Math shit.

By now you've probably all read about the 13 year old girl from Oakland who was declared brain dead after hemorrhaging following 3 surgical procedures in early December.  The family is refusing to believe she is dead, although tests have been run and confirmed by multiple doctors.  It was also confirmed by the head neurologist at an outside hospital (because the family didn't trust the docs at Children's Healthcare of Oakland).

I'm just going to say this one time.

People are dumb as fuck.

If you've read any of the multiple comment sections about this case, you have no doubt seen the inevitable "people wake  up from being brain dead all the time".

Ummm, no they don't.  People have woken up from being in a persistant vegetative state.  They still have minimal brain function.  This kid doesn't.  There is no, I repeat, no blood circulation in her brain.  No brain stem activity.  Nada.

"She's still alive, her heart is still beating".  Again, no. Her heart is beating because she is on a ventilator that is supplying the  heart, with it's very own electrical system, oxygen.  You can take a heart completely out of a body and still get it to beat.

This is not life. This is not being alive.

The insanity has gone on to where even the courts got involved.  The family sued for, and was granted a TRO to keep the hospital from removing ventilator support.

They sued again, and were thankfully denied, to force the hospital to insert a feeding tube and tracheostomy in to the body.  Read the hospital's response to that petition here.

A death certificate was issued with a date of death as 12/12/2013.  The cause of death is pending and autopsy (if the family ever lets that happen).

In the mean time, the body was moved to an "undisclosed" location.  The lawyer has spent a great deal of face time with cameras trying to set up CHO as and unfeeling, murdering institution.  If you listen to  his speeches now, he is trying to allude to the reason her body is  in such bad shape now is because CHO refused to operate on a dead body.

Hello?!  McFly!-- The body is in bad shape because it's DEAD. It's deteriorating and decomposing like a dead body should.  

I could go on, but I am disgusted by all of this.  

I was sympathetic towards the family, at first.  The loss of a child is never, ever easy.  It's not something you can come to grasp with over night.  But nearly one month of this shit falls squarely in to the bat shit crazy camp.

Fund raisers, Go Fund Me sites and on and on.  It's a money grab.  Listen to the uncle after the mom speaks in this video. The $250,000 cap on pain and suffering for minor children is, in his words, chump change.  He thinks 30 million is more appropriate.

Asshole.

What's in a name?

"What's in a name?  A rose by any other name would smell as sweet; so Romeo would were he not Romeo call'd..."

I feel sorry for this next generation.  I really do.  Names have become sort of a free for all with parents these days.  It's not just the Hollywood types that are forever dooming their kids to  weird looks and teasing.  We almost expect these eccentric types to name their kids things like "Apple" and "Pistol" and "Moon Unit".  It's just their way of proving to the world, once again, how unique and unlike "us" they are.

The trouble is,  it seems like everyone is doing it now.  They tell you it makes their kids unique.  It makes them stand out.  Ok, I will agree with standing out.  But when everyone does it, how unique is it really?


I'm all for being yourself.  But you are asking for trouble down the line when you  name your kid "Messiah", "Adolph" or "El Presidente".  Those are some tough names to live up (or down) to. "Butterbean", "Phone" and "Butt" (honest, those are names people actually named their kids! ) aren't any better.

Then there are those people who can't even be satisfied with real words.  They make them up because they sound good.  I'm not kidding when I tell you that I've seen kids named things that you can't even begin to pronounce ("Jal'ee- It's Jaleal, with a silent second 'L' ")  L-A (Ladasha).  Then there was Femalea and Maleb.  You guessed it, mom thought the  hospital named the twins for her when they put "female A" and "male B" on the baby's arm bands.

Combining mom and dad's name to come up with something new is cute.  At least until the paternity test comes back and Maury says he's NOT the daddy.  That one has caused more than a few arguments in the NICU.

My favorite story about names was one delivery I attended where the mom had decided to gift her child with a most unusual name.  To this day, I can not tell you how it was pronounced or how it was even spelled.   I did ask mom before we took the baby to the nursery for observation how to spell the name so we could make a sign.  Mom's reply to me was "S-C-H...no, S-H, no, S-S... Oh how the f*** am I supposed to know?!"

It's not twitter that is making these kids unable to spell, lovies...

I wonder what is in store for some of these kids down the line.  As someone with a long and unusual surname, I grew up with the stigma of every single teacher I ever had stumbling and mispronouncing it.  Not to mention that every single award I ever won had letters transposed or just flat out missing.

Names on a piece of paper are your first introduction to some areas of life.  I'm not sure how far the resume of someone named "Poopy Mcfart-Paste"  will be passed up the hiring chain of command.

Nurse humor 12/19/2013

Oh Hai there!

Nice to meet you.  I'd like to take a minute to introduce myself.  I'm Nurse Grumpy Pants.  I've been an RN for nearly a quarter of a century.  I came in to nursing during the start of the D.R.G. era and I've stuck with it through it's ups and downs.  Most of my experience has been in Pediatrics and NICU, though I did take a brief detour to work with adults briefly. As you can tell from the blog title, most of my time has been been spent working the ungodly shift we call Nocs.

This blog will be mostly my ideas and opinions on things.  The kind of thoughts that I believe most of us nurses think, but would never, ever say out loud...just in case some one was listening.  As the blog goes on, I hope that you will start to share your stories with me and with the rest of the bloggy world.  I would be honored if you would like to write a post here.  Just drop me an email at: notesfromthenightnurse@gmail.com

With a little luck, you will find this blog a place to let go of some of the stress that comes with the nursing profession.  What doesn't kill us makes us stronger...right?  Well, with everything we have been through, we must be darn near invincible by now.

So sit back, have a cup of tea (or something stronger if it's been one of THOSE shifts) and for a little while, know that you are not alone when that little devil on your shoulder starts whispering those inappropriate thoughts!