Still working nights. It's really a whole new world at night. A new population of people come and inhabit the hospital. Things happen, that nobody that works in the day even knows about. I've been amazed at how many people it takes to keep everything looking so nice. The floors for instance- they are waxed it seems weekly at 3am. Does anyone realize that? The other mind boggling fact I've encountered is the TRASH. At 2 in the morning, when I walk the halls to go admit a patient I often see these plastic portable dumpsters loaded with bags of trash. I started thinking about all the trash a hospital must put out each day. Just one person in "isolation" for a dangerous bug, has 2-3 giant bags of trash a day from all the throw-away gowns and gloves that each person must put on for every encounter. And there are at least 6 isolation patients in each of the 10 wards here. When I start calculating all the office trash, surgery trash, ER trash, patient trash -- -little steam is emitted from my ears. IT's got to be semi-truck fulls! Every night while most people are sleeping, a line of semi's must pull up to take the thousands of bags of trash. I should follow it one night just to see - I guess it could be burned? But it disappears for sure - and the whole process begins again in the morning - trash trash trash.
