Shall We Dance?

It's been about 3 weeks now since my last dance lesson. Although you might not have known that if you'd seen my swift moves just yesterday.

I come to work early. Some people consider it to be a little over the top, but I'm so particular about things, especially work related things, that I really would rather come a little early and hear people tease me, than come later and play catch-up all night long. Thus it was that I arrived at work at my usual 6:00 PM. I gathered my papers and settled down to listen to report.

Lately work has been wonderful. I've had great patients with minimal complications. Yet as I received report I had a sickening feeling that my stroll down easy street was about to come to a screeching hault. Come to find out that one of my first patients had recently gone for a stress test where they found some areas of heart muscle that had been without blood for extensive periods of time. Later that day the cardiologist came in and ordered for the patient to have an arteriogram done to see if her coronary arteries were occluded. This is where the story turns ugly. While under sedation in the cath lab the patient's heart stopped, necessitating a rather exhilerating round of CPR to bring her back to life, so to say. But the worst is yet to come. As a general rule whenever someone codes, that patient automatically goes to spend some time in the ICU until they are stable again. Of course, this being the worst case scenario, that is not what happened with this patient. To my horror and amazement the doctor ordered for the patient to come back onto the floor, and I would in fact be taking care of her that night. Instantly a feeling of impending doom overcame my entire being.

15 minutes later I got out of report and continued to get my supplies together. And then it happened. The family that had been at the bedside with the patient called up to the nurses station, panick in her voice. The patient wasn't breathing. 3 of us ran into the room. Sure enough the patient was quickly becoming a deeper shade of blue as she continued to go without oxygen. I ran out of the room and down the hall to get the crash cart. Since the door to the supply room is locked, I entered the code and swung the door open. Propping the door open with one foot, I unplugged the crash cart and pushed it out the door. Not realizing how heavy it was, I was now not only panicked for the patient but for myself because I could not get control of the cart. As I rounded the corner, I spun around attempting to turn the cart so that I was in front of me, allowing me to just take off running with it. Instead, it took on quite a bit of momentum and decided to keep turning. After I crashed the cart into the wall, I continued down the hallway spinning as I went and then crashing into the wall once more before getting the dang thing into the room.

By that time the official code 99 had been called and doctors started coming out of the woodwork. There had to be at least 6 docs in that room, along with the code team, some intensivist RN's, the respiratory therapist, the IV team RN, and a number of ICU RN's and then a bunch of our folks, all yelling and barking orders and pounding on that poor patient's chest. I set up the heart monitor and flung the leads onto the patients chest and then excused myself from the situation, secretly thanking God that she coded before my shift started, meaning really that I was not officially the nurse yet.

For the next hour or so I took my pulse every 15 minutes. My heartrate ran in the 130's for the first half hour after that and then in the 120's for about another half hour. When the adrenaline finally wore off completely I felt almost sick. It wasn't until the next day that I could look at the situation and feel okay with how it all went down. Although I must admit I've heard some jokes about my handling of the crash cart and had some laughs when recalling my series of spins down the hallway. But honestly, that's a kind of dancing I'd rather not practice regularly.