It’s a fairly common debate around here: Are we a ship that happens to have a hospital on it? Or are we a hospital that happens to be located on a ship?
The majority of the time, my answer would be “B”. It generally feels like a hospital to me. Despite the added bonuses of fire drills, overhead announcements about fuel bunkering, the constant white noise of generators, the lack of candles, and the pleasure of trying to explain to people that “yes, in fact, I do live on a boat”, my life here typically revolves around the fact that I am a nurse...in a hospital...doing typical nurse activities. Therefore, I have grown a strong affinity for the hospital-located-on-a-ship philosophy.
Every so often – this week being one of those times - I get swayed to the other side. Surgeries are over, all the patients (and a large proportion of the nurses) have gone home, and now all that is left to do is bleach and pack up every supply and piece of equipment that is required for a hospital to function and get the place ready for the sail. Sounds simple enough
Now, I have never sailed on the Africa Mercy, but, thanks to Discovery Channel Canada, I have seen a computer animation of what happens to our vessel when out on the open sea. It rocks. That being said, everything we store away in the hospital also has to be packed tightly and well secured to some sort of stable structure in order to prevent damage when we head out into the ocean.
These are the times when I am starkly aware of our shipness.
Late Tuesday afternoon, I was standing in the middle of B ward with a fellow nurse. A nurse who is incredibly competent at reading a cardiac rhythm, giving IV antibiotics, drawing venous bloodwork, doing an assessment or suctioning an intubated patient. Those skills proved to be highly useless to us when faced with a ward full of benches that needed to be secured to the ground with some strappy-clippy-tie-things that we couldn’t even begin to figure out how to use. We threw the straps around the ward for a couple minutes, with no particular aim, but hoping that upon manipulation of said ties, we might be inspired as to how the integrity of the benches might be preserved by them.
The answer never came.
We really are a ship, and such tasks are best left undone by folk such as us. Thank goodness for Maike, the one member of our nursing team who knows what she is doing and had the place whipped into shape in about a quarter of the time it would have taken us to pretend to do it.
I guess we all have our strengths. The rest of us spent the week scrubbing and waxing floors. Again, a trade not particularly within in our scope of nursing practice, but one that is at least straight forward enough for us to master within a try or two.
This week, we are definitely a ship.