Shift 65, 66 and 67

Shift 65 and 66:

These were last week and I forgot to blog then.  Now, I can honestly say I can't remember exactly what happened then, but I know one of the days was a little busy.  Nothing interesting happened, that I can say.

Shift 67:

Yesterday's shift.  Was pretty busy when I first got in.  I was called in early due to a nurse having to leave during her shift.  I had a full assignment and thought at one point I'd pull my hair out there was so much going on and so much to do.  Finally, it started to slow down and stayed pretty nice the rest of the night.  We had a lot of fire rescue calls during the night shift, but even with all those calls, we never had all the rooms full at one time.  I never really had anything super interesting going on, but all of my patients yesterday were admitted.  I never once discharged any of them. We have these things that are called "Core Measures" and when someone comes in with a stroke/TIA, chest pain/MI, pneumonia, congestive heart failure......we have to use these core measures to ensure the patients get the best treatment.  Its not just my hospital; hospitals all over use these.  Anyway, I had to use the stroke, chest pain and congestive heart failure core measures on my patients yesterday.  It can be a little time consuming.  Two of my patients went to ICU.  I can go weeks without an ICU patient.  And the only really interesting thing that I did yesterday was give a patient a medicine called Atropine, which is used to increase the heart rate.  Normal heart rate is 60-100 beats per minute (bpm).  Her heart rate was in the 40's and kept dipping down into the high 30's.  Usually we don't do anything in the 50's or high 40's, but once you start dipping below that, it gets dangerous.  Once I gave her the atropine, her heart rate went into the 80's.  Eventually it started going lower again, but pretty much maintained itself in the 60's.

Well, I'm back at it again tomorrow, then I have two days off and then back at it for the weekend.  I have 5 more shifts until I have a nice 6 day off stretch.  Until then.........