Shift 58, 59 and 60

Sigh.  Even with 4 days off, I am still struggling to write my blog.  So here goes- short and sweet.

Shift 58

Not too busy and nothing interesting to talk about.  It was my first shift of three in a row and I worked with two awesome charge nurses.

Shift 59

Today was also not too busy of a day.  But we did have a couple of interesting patients in the ER today. One was a young man who came in (wasn't my patient) and turned out one of his lungs were deflated.  He needed a chest tube put in to "reinflate" his lung.  I got to watch.  It was my second time ever watching this done and the first time in the ER. Second patient was brought in by family members who asked one of the staff workers in the parking lot where the ER entrance was and if there was a quicker way to get in.  Behind them was another family member running up with a limp, unresponsive 3 year old.  They quickly came in through the side door, wheeled a patient out of one of the rooms, and moved her onto a bed and into the room.  Patient started seizing and vomiting.  Apparently, she was asleep and vomited, family member went into check on her, and she was not waking up.  She was breathing and had a pulse, but was responsive.  We took her to cat scan, and then when she returned the ER doc made the decision to intubate her in order to protect her airway because she had seized again and had also vomited.  We do not have a peds unit in our hospital so we had to transfer her to another hospital.  That was pretty much the extent of our care for her.  And that was pretty much it for my shift.

Shift 60

I don't know what happened, but when I got in, it was already going crazy.  It was so busy.  My charge nurse had me go up front to triage to relieve someone for their lunch break, and that person never came back.  So I stayed up there from 2 until 7pm when it was shift change.  At one point, we had myself and another nurse up front triaging patients because we got backed up.  In the back, we had fire rescue after fire rescue bringing in patients.  Finally after shift change it started to slow down and was never really bad after that.  I don't even think we had any fire rescues come in after 8pm until I left at 2am.  When I left at 2am, there were only 3 or 4 patients in the ER.  Nothing really interesting happened this shift.

I work again tomorrow, so stay tuned for more soon.