more more more

In my 12 years of nursing, I caught on pretty quickly that things usually come in groups, of at least three.
If you admit one GI bleed, expect a few more.
If you've got one pneumonia patient, a few more will be arriving, any minute.
Just one overdose? Why not three more to complicate your life, even more?
It's like the whole, small West Coast Podunkian community has to jump on the bandwagon, so the sick person cannot be alone.
Right now, we keep admitting, to the ICU/Stepdown, DNR's who are dying.
This is the pattern we are stuck in.
These people are DNR's. Most of them are in their 80's, and they are dying. In my ICU. Why in my ICU? Because, the floor nurses of Podunk seem to have hypnotized these doctors into thinking that the ICU is a fertile place for people to die. Dying patient has low blood pressure? Send them to the ICU where we will bolus them (maybe) and try to let them die with dignity.
Change in your DNR patients level of conciousness? Call a rapid response call (no I am NOT kidding) then transfer the patient to the ICU so they can die down there.
The catch-phrase these floor nurses have glommed onto? "DNR doesn't mean we don't treat their symptoms".
It makes me think that they don't know how to administer a bolus, or give morphine for air hunger, or, worse yet, interact with the dying patient and their families. Death was, is, and ALWAYS will be a part of our job, whether we like it or not. And the Doctors? I think they are tired of the floor nurses calling them repeatedly about the dying patient. They know we won't do that, so they transfer them. (One of them has even admitted this to me, in secret, of course.)

So, right now we have a garden full of celestial discharges in the making. Oh, well. At least, with us, we know they will go to their rewards comfortable.