Locked in and nowhere to go...

So I spent my first four hours of my shift tonight on the locked unit. You know locked in. I have worked on the locked unit a lot. More then a lot whatever that comes out to. You would have thought that there was a full moon tonight the way that things went down.

When one patient decides that they have had enough it sets of a chain of events that literally can bring the whole system down. I had one patient screaming at me and another one holding his walker over his head as if to hit me. I had one patient that was hiding in her room because she was afraid of the screamer and another patient who was literally trying to call the cops, telling them that we were holding her against her will. It was 4 hours of just absolute chaos. I have to say something about the nurses on psych they are amazing, they stayed calm through out it all.

There is a hierarchy when you work in a hospital...who has the hardest patients, which floors are the busiest. Most of the time on the bottom of that totem pole is psych floor. Most floors...meds, surg, peds all look down on psych. After tonight though I can appreciate why a psych nurse is a psych nurse and why it is so specialized. I have now seen what busy is on the psych floor and it rivals busy on surgery any day. These psych nurses that I worked with were like poetry in motion. One took the screamer, the other took the caller, one took the crazed walker man, I got the patient that was hiding in her room and together as a team we brought order and dare I say it sanity to the floor so that by the time the night shift came in the worst of the offenders were tucked in bed and sleeping.

I was moved off psych for my last 8 hours of my shift as I needed to float but I feel like those 4 hours were the busiest of my shift and probbably the 4 where I learned the most also.