Last night was my 1st night out on the unit and it went really well, such a big change from the flow of the nicu. Despite the major differences I really enjoyed it and the kind of pace it it. Things were going great, we had the typical belly painers, headaches with high BP, groin abscess, MVAs, rectal bleeding, etc. Then at 0530 EMS brings this guy in, septic, with shortness of breath, fever, and vomiting. He puked once while EMS is bringing him in and then after we get him on bipap, it was like the scene in the exorcism. Projectile vomit across the room. It was so bad we were gowned and masked to clean this guy up. I forgot how terrible adult smells are and I don’t do vomit well. Looks like I’m going to have to get used to it.
So after spending over an hr in that room we finally get out to the desk to do whatever charting we can right before day shift gets here, and this or comes out to the desk with the typical “get me the person in charge, not the charge nurse, I want the head supervisor, etc. I’ve been back here an hr and nobody is doing anything for me, yadayadayada.” Now, you have to understand that there was only one other nurse in our zone and she had 4 pts she was working on, and we had another pt that showed up at the same time as Mr. Exorcism that we had done nothing on, so I didn’t have a while lot of sympathy for someone who was complaining about neck pain or.some such thing that she had come to the ER last week for. Sorry bout ya, but we are not your primary doctor so you are going to have to wait while we take care of our septic pt since this is the EMERGENCY room.
We will see what night 2 has in store for us 🙂
Small butts to big butts 