Drought or deluge

My mind has been wandering lately, probably because of the nature of my work. It goes up or down depending on the number of patients we have, i.e. census. This past week I was put on call twice because of a low patient census. Then on Thursday it shot up to 23 with 3 patients going home. Later we got 3 admissions so we were back up to 23. Today we were scheduled for 7 admissions so I fully expect our census to be close to 30 when I go to work tomorrow. The common phrase at work for this phenomenon is feast or famine. I prefer drought or deluge because we're either thirsting for patients so that everyone can get their hours in or we're so flooded with patients that we don't have enough staff to take care of them all. Somewhere in there is a happy medium, but we seldom reach that. Despite all this, I enjoy my work. I get to meet a wide variety of people, and most of them are discharged home within 1-3 days. Then a new crop comes in. My work is hardly ever boring.

All right, on to the wandering. Just recently finished reading Ship of Ghosts by James Hornfischer. It's a history of the USS Houston which was the first ship to see action in WWII after Pearl Harbor. Her crew fought bravely and then endured a horrific yet heroic time as Japanese prisoners. His previous book was "The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors" which chronicled the experiences of the sailors, marines, and pilots of the Battle of the Leyte Gulf. Both are riveting and well worth reading. The author's site is at www.jameshornfiscer.com

Just realized how late it is and I have to get up at 5:00 in the morning. More wandering soon but now I need to get some sleep. Later