I should have known that it was gonna be "one of those days" from the start. Having being messed around with my shift on Saturday night, I decided my first action of Sunday would be to confirm my shifts. So I did, and my shifts for the rest of the weekend were the same. So, with relief, I got myself ready for work, and headed out to work in my car (this will be relevant later, in case you were wondering why I'm giving such a blow by blow account!).
I got to the ward and introduced myself, to which the nurse pulled a face, and then carried on doing whatever she was doing. Because of all the hassles I get, being moved, I always introduce myself and confirm they're expecting me. After a couple of minutes (during which time, I'm thinking to myself, "oh no, I'm missing handover, maybe I should go find it") she finally gets to me, saying that she doesn't think I should be there. I got rather annoyed by this statement, so I point out to her that I confirmed it just a few hours before hand. Then she gets distracted again, and ignores me for another couple of minutes. I mean come on, if I'm not supposed to be working there, then I should be finding out where I was supposed to be, to minimise the lateness to that ward, or horror of annoying horrors, heading home if they couldn't find anywhere for me. Then perhaps sensing my growing annoyance and frustration, she grabs me and takes me to their handover room. Noone there is any the wiser, but all there seem to think that they aren't expecting another HCA. So now bordering on anger and getting ready to fight with someone over this mess, I phone the bank office (people who allocate shifts and work as a liason between the wards and the temporary staff like me). I confirm with them that I'm where I'm supposed to be, and they ask to speak to someone from the ward, to which they all refuse to do so. So the bank office say that they'll phone the ward directly (I was phoning them on my mobile). So after a few more minutes, I get the confirmation that I'm supposed to be there, and I can stay, even though this effectively makes the ward overstaffed - how I do wish people would communicate with each other, as it's always us bank staff that get the recieving end of the fallout.
So, I settle down, after the nurse giving me a piece of her mind with some crappy curt comment about how it's not all about me, that we're there to look after the patients, and it's all about patient safety and if this means I'm inconvienenced, well tough. Hello! She totally missed the point of why I was so annoyed, and in my defence, if I'm not meant to be there, somewhere else, there are other patients who are not getting my care and their safety is being compromised! Annnoying **** of a woman! So I had handover.
Then on the last few patients in the handover, one of the other nurses comes in and says "Is there an Ashleigh here? You have been moved to ward (let's anonomise it) X. Sorry". I hate ward X, and usually avoid it like the ruddy plague. Just perfect!
Ward X is a cohort ward (people who know the BRI now know where I was! So much for keeping it anonomous!) which means they grab everyone with infective diarrhea and put them together. Ok, so it is more civilised than I just described, but it does automatically make one think they have a night of buttom cleaning and bed making ahead of them. And when I arrived I found out that I was there to one-on-one babysit a patient who was very confused, aggitated and unsteady. Poor chap looked like he was on the loosing end of a heavyweight boxing match, so covered in bruises and cuts and scraps from his many falls. In the end it wasn't too bad. He slept most of the night, becoming a bit restless every now and then, and there was only one occasion when I thought we were about to come acropper (we didn't, phew!). So I sat on an uncomfortable chair at the open door of his cubicle most of the night, knitting away whilst he serenaded me with this snores!
The other downside to this ward is the fact fact that I was working with two very loud nurses. Nothing against them, they were nice and friendly, but shouted their way through drool topic after drool topic for most of the night. I really wanted to tell them to shhhhhh! as it was a night shift, people are trying to sleep, and my poor chap didn't need a series of excited exclamations continously rousing him from his peaceful and much needed slumber. But who am I to tell off nurses, when I'm just a temp HCA? So I kept this to myself, until one of them went to the loo, then came back shouting extra loud into the momentary silence that accompanied the two of them being split up that it had started snowing. To which I went "ssshhhhhhhhhhhh! You'll wake everyone up!" Response? Nonchalant shrug!
Mmmm, snow.... it was around midnight, and it was night a snug inside, so I added snowfalling watching to my routine of "glance at knitting, glance at patient, listen out to patient's snores, glance at knitting and pick up stitch droped whilst looking at patient". For two hours! I couldn't really see much of outstide, but on the roofs and carpark area that I could see, the snow had settled a little, but over the course of the morning the snow piles seemed to shrink, so I assumed that this meant it was melting, and that the drive home would be ok. How wrong could I get! This is what I found when I eventually got to Ernie (my car), all frosty, hungry and tired:
There's my Ernie, the blue car, looking extra blue under his snow blanket and a very icy road. 
And after several minutes hard, cold work, with no gloves, I got to this:
Wipers still frozen solid to the windscreen, far side doors iced shut and all my deicer used up.
At this point, I have to talk about how the kindness of strangers has affected my life. When I first got to the car, I was horrified by the extent of iced snow on it. And I remembered seeing my ice scraper when I was packing at the end of last year, so I didn't think it was in the car, so I nipped into the newsagent next to where I had parked, just on the off chance that they sold them, but he didn't. He spent ages looking around for his, incase he had one in the shop, then he kept an eye on me as I attempted to use an empty 2L plastic bottle (fairly effective in a push!) and then I eventually got fed up and search my car, turned out, Ernie was hiding my scraper under one of the chairs. Then once I got it all cleared, I took one look at the road and the few cars attempting it. I wasn't feeling too confident about driving, but oh, so hungry and tired and cold. The chap came out of his shop and started to give me advice about driving in such icy conditions. Then I told him that I was toying with the idea of leaving the car and getting a bus. I then asked if he knew what the rest of the day was forcasted to be like. He didn't know, but he took me back inside the shop and we looked through teletext (surprisingly unhelpful!). Still torn, but with my need for food and sleep getting greater, I was resigned to leave it. Then the sweetest thing - he offered to make me a cup of tea or coffee. He was so sweet and gentle about it. I was so touched and by that point in the day, I almost felt like crying. Thank you kind kind man. But I felt bad from distracting him from his shop, so I declined.
I eventually decided to trapse back to work, and get some breakfast and wait a little while to see if conditions improved, and toyed with the idea of nicking a blanket and crashing on one of the sofas in the common room. I didn't in the end, I wanted my bed! So I climbed the crazy Cardiac Hill for the second time, back to the car, in the hope that it would be better to drive. It was, slightly. So very carefully, taking heed of what my new friend had told me about driving in snow, I eased Ernie out and started on my way home.
Wow, I've never driven in such conditions, and even though I was on roads I've driven down a thousand times before, the feel of it and the strange commeradery of the other drivers made it feel like an exciting (if not very much on edge!) adventure. Listening to the radio, I found out that the street I live on, one of the busiest in Bristol, hadn't been gritted (! ooops Bristol City Council!) for a large section, so I carefully planned a new route home to miss this, and thinking about which roads were considered "main enough" to have been gritted and driven a lot. And off I went. Much of the journey in first gear, and never more than second, and never going faster than 15mph, I crawled home, via the petrol station (something I had always planned to do, and was getting paranoid, although the light hadn't come on, I was running low, and had been idling the car for ages) and got more deicer. Then hit awful traffic. So a journey which yesterday took less than five minutes, today took nearly an hour! And no, buses wouldn't have been faster, as they would have got stuck in traffic.
In the end, I got to bed just after 11, having been awake since 3:30 yesterday afternoon. I'm normally in bed by 9 after a night shift.
And here I am, sleep deprived but safe and sound. And I'm definitely getting the bus tonight! Even though it's less than ideal, it will be best. I'm just starting to get worried now about getting back to Derby. Was aiming for tomorrow, and was thinking it would be tiredness dependent. Now it's going to be weather dependent. I've just heard they've issued a severe weather warning for Bristol for tonight with more heavy snow expected. But I'll worry about it when I need to. I just need to stick with being safe for now.
Finally, despite the dramas that was this day, there was calm and beauty everywhere, especially at 7:30 in the morning. Only had my phone, but still some lovely snaps.
The last one was the local Christmas tree sale lot. This close to Christmas, it's somewhat depleted, but the snow on the trees made it seem wonderfully seasonal!
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