Day 2 early morning.

Not bad eh! This is how I found Elsa this morning. She has been experiencing some nausea, but otherwise it's been fairly uneventful. She does not feel any pain, even though she has not been using the pain cocktail they have her hooked up to. They did not have her connected to oxygen this time, so she only has the NG tube connected through her nose. This is usually the main reason for her prolonged discomfort, so hopefully she will be able to get rid of it soon.

The hospital installed a new paging system for nurses. Before you would press a button and an assistant would come and ask what the patient needed. Then, if it were necessary, a nurse or a doctor would come. Now, you press a button and some person in the nurse's station answers the call and finds out what the patient needs. Sounds good, except the system sucks and it is hard to hear what the person is saying through the speaker and, Elsa's case, when the patient has a tube through her nose, it is hard for the patient to speak so the attendant does nor hear.

So, even though Elsa had been asking for nausea medication since 5am, it was only after I intervened when I came in at 8am that it finally became clear to the attendant that if a patient has a tube through her nose then it will be hard to hear what that patient in saying. What amazed me was that the attendant never actually bothered to take the ten steps necessary to see what was going on.