Christmas Eve A Blaze

Okay so I am very far behind but I couldn’t skip what happened on Christmas eve at work.  First we have to work either Christmas eve or Christmas day and they switch you to the opposite of last year.  This was my year to work Christmas eve.  So of course since half are on one day and the other half the next we are really short.  3 nurses 3 cnas for about 55 patients.  I would have loved to had just someone to answer the effin telephone.  Because if family couldn’t come in they were calling to talk to patients or to get updates on them. The sad part is most of these people you don’t hear from them until a major holiday.  Anyway it was an awful day.  I was the skilled nurse/ phone operator/ cna helper since we had 3 and many other tasks rolled into one.  I was behind on my skilled charting.  In fact I hadn’t done my 8am head to toe assessments openings.  But the rest of the nurses asked if they could help I told them to go home I would be done within the hour.  WRONG…at 430pm the fire alarm goes off.  What kind of idiot is doing a drill on Christmas eve.  Well no smoke no sign of fire.  The box says it's in the janitor closet.  So they check it out.  No fire.  By this time we have cleared the halls and all the pts are in their rooms behind shut door or in the dayroom behind shut doors.  Next we see 4 maintenance men and security from the hospital.  Then follows 4 firefighters and a police officer. Still no one can find this fire. They have the ladder truck on the side of the building checking for a fire on top of the building.  NONE…the alarm again sounds now it's in the utility room..and we can smell something burning.  We now have to evacuate 4 pts to the dayroom due to their rooms full of choking smoke. Next the whole wing of 28 pts evacuated into the dayroom on first floor and second floor. I have never seen people put into chairs and put into the dayroom so fast.  Not to mentions trying to come up with O2 for pts that needed it.  Or chairs for those that didn’t have any.  Don’tcha love budgets… Finally the fire is located…apparently it was a dryer with some type of plastic in it.  Causing it to overheat and the smoke must have been going up the wall and setting other sensors off until it started smoking enough to set the one off in the laundry room.  So needless to say it was 730 pm before I went home.  I was disappointed in the big wigs who didn’t stay to help feed patients and pass out trays.  It was 630 when the trays came up and not to mention no one had done there first round. So most were drenched…I stayed to help pass trays and do some feeding.  But hell I had been there since 6am and the big wigs got paged in when the fire hit the fan…so why didn’t they help catch us up?  They could have at least helped wheeled pts back to their rooms and help with passing trays out…heaven forbid…grrr