2nd Day
13 hours, mostly on my feet. A low point around 11 am when I spent 15 minutes certain that I just could never be ready to be a staff nurse and I really might as well hang it up right now but oh no what would I do instead? But then it got good again. I broke sterility doing a dressing change and forgot to do Mr. B's vitals and then later forgot to check whether his Mesna had all run in or not, but I actually was getting to the point where I could be a tiny bit useful. Julie, my preceptor, also told me I was very smart and doing an impressively good job for just my second day, which cheered me up tremendously. I was feeling like such a dimwitted klutz.
They went back and forth about 5 times about whether or not they were going to send Mr. G back up to us from the MICU, and then they finally did, and he was kind of scarily unstable. They had just pulled out the pigtail catheter from the membrane around his heart (where fluid had been collecting, and starting to cause something they call tamponade, where the fluid builds up so much that the pressure of it impinges on the heart's actually beating. bad, bad news), and his wound kept oozing and oozing. And he was short of breath and wheezy. And then his heart started to go back into atrial fibrillation, which is a fluttering of the upper chambers of the heart, which makes it do its job much less well. And he was sometimes with it and sometimes not. He told his wife and me at one point that we should unload the stuff before the cops came. He referred to his patient-controlled analgesia button as the detonator. He was hooked up to a machine to constantly measure his blood pressure and pulse and oxygenation, and both his pulse and his oxygenation were wildly all over the place. His pulse was sometimes in the 90s, and sometimes in the 160s; his oxygen sats went from 65 to 100 and back again--all within the space of a minute or two. It still wasn't clear whether he was going to go back to the ICU by the time we signed out to the next nurse around 7:45.
Fortunately, Mr. B stayed steady as a rock. He didn't see much of us. I'd slip away periodically to check on him and do his vitals and stuff.
Now my feet hurt. But you know what? They had free nectarines in the cafeteria today.
They went back and forth about 5 times about whether or not they were going to send Mr. G back up to us from the MICU, and then they finally did, and he was kind of scarily unstable. They had just pulled out the pigtail catheter from the membrane around his heart (where fluid had been collecting, and starting to cause something they call tamponade, where the fluid builds up so much that the pressure of it impinges on the heart's actually beating. bad, bad news), and his wound kept oozing and oozing. And he was short of breath and wheezy. And then his heart started to go back into atrial fibrillation, which is a fluttering of the upper chambers of the heart, which makes it do its job much less well. And he was sometimes with it and sometimes not. He told his wife and me at one point that we should unload the stuff before the cops came. He referred to his patient-controlled analgesia button as the detonator. He was hooked up to a machine to constantly measure his blood pressure and pulse and oxygenation, and both his pulse and his oxygenation were wildly all over the place. His pulse was sometimes in the 90s, and sometimes in the 160s; his oxygen sats went from 65 to 100 and back again--all within the space of a minute or two. It still wasn't clear whether he was going to go back to the ICU by the time we signed out to the next nurse around 7:45.
Fortunately, Mr. B stayed steady as a rock. He didn't see much of us. I'd slip away periodically to check on him and do his vitals and stuff.
Now my feet hurt. But you know what? They had free nectarines in the cafeteria today.
posted by Rosie Bonner at 9:57 PM
2 Comments:
Mmmmm nectarines and free ones, too! It's the little joys that keep us going, isn't it? Hang in there...
I am fascinated by delusions. Humans seem to have a wired-in pattern of fear thoughts.
Post a Comment
<< Home