You have a shortage of what?! Are you serious?

I worked the last few nights and we had more than our usual obstacles. We were running out of IV morphine. We called pharmacy because our patients were receiving 2 mg and they had us using 10 mg syringes. Which is annoying first of all, because we have to have another nurse witness the waste. Sometimes they put larger doses in by accident. They told us that they are no longer going to carry morphine.

One of the other nurses asked them if they were serious and "isn't this a hospital?" Morphine is probably the second-most used narcotic pain reliever. It is even in the acronym for treatment of chest-pain—MONA. (That stands for morphine, oxygen, nitroglycerin and aspirin.) Pharmacy then explained that they were joking—they never joke with us and frankly with 7-8 patients each, we weren't in the mood.

Pharmacy then explained to us that their supplier has a back-order on morphine and they didn't know when they would get some in. (Immediately my mind goes to a drug dealer…only one that is legal…without the shady transactions.) Then I'm thinking that if they don't know when they are going to get more morphine in, why are we "wasting" 8 mg each time we need two? Sounds crazy! Also, what are we going to tell the doctors when we run out? "Um, sorry doc but we ran out of morphine." We'd get laughed at!!

In all reality, we probably wouldn't totally run out, but the possibility of it was just too much not to share.

I was getting ready for work yesterday in the locker room and I was telling another nurse a story in which I said "oh stink." the other nurse asked me "did you just say 'oh stink?'" I replied in the affirmative and one of the dayshift nurses said she says it too. He asked us if he could start saying it and the dayshift nurse told him we'd be honored. :)

We have had our fair share of float pool nurses recently as we've been so busy. The float pool nurses say that they love coming to our floor because we are so helpful and don't treat them like they are a pariah that has an über-contagious disease that spreads by smiles or conversation. We welcome the help! Help us! We'll thank you for it!!

Padme, my dog, is the hunter of my two dogs. This afternoon when I woke up, she was steadily barking at something while she was in her pen. I went out there and she was barking at a frog in the yard outside her pen. I thought I'd help her and the poor frog. Well, I went to grab him to move him to another spot in the yard and he jumped into the dog pen. Oh snap! Sorry frog, I cannot help you when you go into her territory.

I really like the word "rediculicious." (I'm impressed that my iPhone had it in it's vocabulary.) I don't know why, but I do. I want to use it a lot, but it's not always appropriate.

It's really warm today. 84 degrees and sunny right now. Not that I'm complaining or anything…

I'm so excited because I got our tickets to see Eclipse. We are going to the triple feature. It was was only $20 for those tickets and $10 for just Eclipse. How can you not go to the triple feature? So far, there are seven of us going…