more blogs please!

So, per request of Dori, I am gong to try to increase my bloggage. Truthfully, Leslie usually has us so busy, I don't have time to blog and when I do, my brain isn't functioning properly. Leslie's out of town this weekend though and I've been cleaning and packing, so I thought I'd take a minute to fulfill Dori's wishes.
I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but one thing that I absolutely love about traveling is the fact that you can leave every 3 months. It almost seems like I'm afraid of commitment! Friday was a pretty crappy day at the NH and it made me very thankful to know that every job I go to, there is an end in sight. I know sometimes as travelers, you get the crap jobs and are expected to have more productivity, and work less time. This place has been pretty good about that up to this point though. Leslie and I both are very adamant about providing the best patient care possible within limitations of the patient's abilities. Most of the time at a nursing home, the only objective is to make money, not considering the patient might be 100 years old with cancer, they want to "ultra" them. To "ultra" a patient means to schedule them for the most amount of therapy minutes possible which is usually 75 minutes per discipline. In a normal inpatient rehab setting, that's not that big of a deal. The patients are usually younger and have met a long list of criteria demonstrating their ability to perform therapy for that amount of time. When you have an 89 year old woman with dementia and a new leg amputation who doesn't even want to get out of bed ever, that's a long ass time. Working in nursing homes has made me realize that I have 2 options in my career. 1. When I do settle down again, be 150% sure it won't be at a nursing home. 2. Leave the field of OT. Now I love OT. It is an incredible feeling to know that you are helping someone regain independence and improving quality of life. What hate are insurance companies and Medicare tha dictate how much therapy is needed when the auditors may not even have a high school education and even more than that, I hate the administrators at nursing homes who have pushed the limit and cheated so many times that Medicare feels the need to cut deserving people off. I have a patient with a stage III-IV sacral wound. It is awful. When you pull the bandage away, you see the bone. This patient has mets and a new dx of a spinal tumor, so comes with a presentation of paraplegia. There is no way this patient should be allowed on a foam cushion, ever. Leslie and I fought and fought and received a $5 "gel" cushion that you have to fill up with water. Are you frickin kidding me! So we allow her to be up for about 30 minutes doing constant pressure reliefs because the cheap ass NH won't purchase a good enough cushion. Those are the issues that therapists have to face every day and if you're not facing it, and you work at a NH then let me know if they're hiring or you're too ignorant to know what the patient really needs.
UGH!!!! Okay, off that rant. It's been raining for 2 days straight and constant. The girls are miserable because we can't even take a walk and I'm miserable because I cooped up in this apartment the whole weekend. Still no word on a job in Cincinnati, but I'm hopeful Katy will call with something amazing this week. It's almost like Christmas every time where you anticipate so much and are so excited, then you get there all the excitement's over. I'll just be happy to be home until the end of January!