Not On the Team

It has been brought to my attention for, oh say, my entire life, that I am not a team player. I have, of course, learned to disguse this much better since the time in fourth grade when I protested my assignment to a group project with the words "but he's stupid and she's mean!!!!" I'm saying here, that no one ever talked to me anyway, because I came from our subdivision's Official Weird Family, but I'm also saying that I was a less than graciouse dork. ( Note on a subdivision: you either understand this as a housing entity or you don't. For those who wish to try and understand, even slightly, the anti- human design a "sub" is, let me describe. It is, first and foremost, a large street that feeds onto a usefull street, a street that goes somewhere. This large street, which is NOT called Main St, or This Way Out St., or anything at all useful, is the only way in or out of the sub. Branching from the access road, like the auxillary blood vessels that frequently swarm around tumors, are the rest of the sub's streets. These streets also go nowhere. They twist and turn, are emphatically not grid like, and have nothing in them but houses. Poignantly, they are sometimes named for the type of plant life that was scraped off the site by the builders, but you will see no Birches, Oaks, or Maples on the streets that bear their names. There are no stores in a sub. There are no office buildings, no pizza joints, no liquor stores, no drug stores, no nothing. In the area I grew up, there was an elementary school in each sub, and a junior high school shared by four subs, and a high school shared by twelve subs. The elementary schools were built on an identical floor plan, so that if you ever happened to find yourself in a different school, say for a cousin's school play, you knew instantly where everything was. The houses also displayed the same regularity. We had your colonial, your ranch, and you split level, and that was it. No one ever had to ask where the bathroom was in someone elses house. Ok, enough about the sub, but let's just say that as members of a different faith, the first "broken home", and college educated mom, we were different. Different is bad, dude.)

Ok, so more about me. Today at work there was a code. This happens at hospitals- they are full of sick people, and sick people sometimes give on things like breathing and need to be nudged back. So, I'm in the bathroom, and I hear a code called to the floor that I am on. SOmething odd happens. I do not skip wiping, rip my pants up and run like hell to the room. I do not push the cart. I do not grab an ambu bag. I am not on the team. I wash my hands, and think, wow, I'm not an ICU nurse anymore. Don't get me wrong, there were stacks of people there, all doing the stuff you're supposed to do. They didn't need me. I wasn't the PICU nurse anymore, shoving to the head of the bed untill someone better than me got there to bag. I did not place my standard code IV ( the saphonous vein- top of the foot. Usually unsullied and cradled nicely betweet the metatarsales- you don't even have to see it. You can use the force.) It was really, really weird. At some point, I went around and checked on some of the other patients, and then they needed another central line tray but the person they asked didn't know what that was , so I got one and took it in, and then I wandered back to my office to go remind myself why I had been on that floor in the first place. Right- a diabetic was waiting to learn the mysteries of the glucometer. I had a diet coke, went back up, and did my spiel. For someone who's not so into being a team player, it was weird that I felt so left out and lost.