In the last two weeks, my center has had a serious staff shortage. One tech quit, one tech went on maternity leave, and then one of the nurses broke her foot. Today, to help take up the slack, they had a nursing student who works as a "floater" at the regular hospital training to help at the center. He won't be doing much with the patients, but he's being trained to clean the machines and do all the other grunt work so they can make do with fewer nurses or techs on a shift until they can hire a replacement or two. Poor little guy is kind of overwhelmed attempting to figure it all out today. He's knows so little at this point that we had to explain what a dialyzer was. He was following my nurse from patient to patient as she was taking a group of us off the machines at the end of the day. She introduced him to me, pulled my first needle for me, and then dashed away to deal with another patient's beeping machine. He called out to her to ask what he should do next. Distracted, she called over her shoulder, "Go ahead and strip Jbeany."
When his eyes got done bugging out of his head, and we stopped laughing, we explained that she meant strip the tubing and dialyzer off the machine.
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