I called the unit in the morning, during the drive to our camping site.
"He went down to the OR at 0800," said the charge nurse. "Victor* is his
nurse today. Want me to have him call you when Tiberius gets back?"
"Yeah," I said. My phone had two bars of service, and I knew by the time
we reached our campsite, my phone would be an expensive paperweight.
I called again two hours later, as we reached the area of no service. I
could barely understand Victor. "He's still in surgery," he said. "They
got the full open-heart scrub team. They expect it to run four to six
hours."
It was, by the way, totally illegal for him to tell me even this much
over the phone. I am grateful that Victor is a bit of a cowboy, because I
was so stressed out over Tiberius I was having heartburn.
The lake, when we reached it, was beautiful. It's a deep glacier gouge
between old mountains, blue and green with dissolved calcium, clear down
to the bottom, with milky mists rolling over it in the morning and
evening. Ducklings paddled at our shoreline campsite. Smoke from the
campfire drifted through the old-growth trees; I sat in a hammock,
holding a book, breathing the scents of peaty moss in the sun and
mineral water lapping against the trees, listening to a two-year-old
chatter about rocks over the soft unlikely moan of wind in the highest
branches of the forest.
"I'm going to drive back to Port Angeles," I said suddenly. "I'm gonna
get more firewood, and some ice, and a salmon to roast over the fire."
"I thought we were having chopped vegetables and sausage," said my
husband, who was burning his fifth marshmallow already, because he likes
his smores carcinogenic and only camps so he can stick food in a fire
without getting weird loos.
"I changed my mind," I said, and put on my shoes and hiked back to the car.
In Port Angeles I picked up the aforementioned goods (and a bottle of
wine and some extra baby wipes and a bag of chips), but before I even
reached the town I was checking my phone every five minutes to see if
service had returned. At last I got my two bars back, and called the
ICU.
"He's still in OR," said Victor. It had been seven hours. "I'll text you when I get elevator call, okay?"
I ate the chips in the car, parked outside the grocery store, waiting.
Thirty-five minutes later I jerked awake to the buzz of my phone.
Four texts in quick succession, apparently sent at different times, just now squeezing through the terrible cell coverage:
He's closed
Elevator call
Landed- BP good + sats 95
Looks like shit but stable + bronch fixed + thorx closed
I responded: Thanks man, keep em alive. Then I drove back to the
campsite through the growing dusk and crawled back into my hammock,
where I lay ignoring my book and staring at the lake until my brain
finally remembered to be somewhere else than work.
------
It was a good camping trip. I forgot to worry for a while.
------
On the way home, passing through Port Angeles, I called the unit again.
It was Monday morning, eightish, and I was ashamed of myself for not
remembering until after I'd had breakfast. "Can I talk to Tiberius's
nurse," I asked the secretary, and she made a sound of regret.
"I'm sorry," she replied. "He had another STEMI last night. They withdrew this morning. He died about an hour ago."
"Oh," I said. "Okay. Thank you."
It was a long drive home.
Showing posts with label end of shift. Show all posts
Showing posts with label end of shift. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Week 6 Shift 2
I walked onto the unit and was greeted with perplexed stares. “What are
you doing here,” said the charge nurse, frozen in place, still holding
her pager six inches from the countertop where she was reaching.
Everyone who wasn’t already giving me a funny look turned and joined the
crowd.
“Uh,” I said. I hadn’t had any coffee yet. “I work here?”
“You aren’t scheduled today,” said the charge nurse. “The book says you’re on vacation.”
I considered this for way, way longer than I should have. I was leaving the next morning at the crack of dawn, headed out to the Olympic Peninsula for a weekend of camping with my husband, one of my closest friends (whose wife, my other closest friend, was stuck in town for the weekend with houseguests), and my friends’ ridiculously adorable kid, the 2.5yo. I hadn’t packed yet, had done minimal food prep, and hadn’t slept worth shit for a week because I was worried about Tiberius.
“So… should I go home?”
“No no no no! Don’t go anywhere! Can you stay? You’ll get your pt back. Don’t go anywhere.”
Just then my unit manager arrived. “What’s all the shouting about,” he said, then spotted me and pulled a double take. “I thought you were camping!”
“That’s tomorrow,” I said. “If I stay until three, can I go home?”
So I ended up working a measly eight hours today, which was a blessed relief, because Tiberius was gearing up for a Hail Mary surgery first thing tomorrow morning and needed every delicate fine-tuning touch I could give him. The pulms and CT surgeons agreed: the repeated chest tube occlusions and stump perforations were taking far too much of a toll on his limited resources, and the still-sort-of-open thoracotomy was starting to dehisce. The ARDS is beginning to retreat, but he’s still hanging on the edge, and his cardiac output is consistently in the trash because of the insane pressure differential in the various parts of his chest.
My job today was to give him every inch of gained ground I could fight for. I titrated down his pressors with extreme care, just low enough to give wiggle room in case they had to crank ‘em up in surgery, not low enough to challenge him. I talked plans with the pulm, and got orders for albumin (to pull water in from the tissues) and Lasix (to shed the water, reducing the heart’s afterload, the amount of back-pressure it’s pushing against as it tries to perfuse the tissues). I timed them with exquisite care and pulled this stunt three times in a row without rocking his vital signs, before finally chickening out of Round 4 because his heart rate went up ten points.
And I started working really hard on his bowels.
Tiberius was backed up as all hell. I think I mentioned before that his distended colon was causing pressure issues with his heart and his venous return; I took it on myself to get that shit out of there, and championed the cause of poop until I’m pretty sure Dr Sunny worried about my sanity. I dosed him with bowel meds; I administered enemas; I finally, in a fit of desperation, gloved up to the wrists and performed digital disimpaction and stimulation of his rectum.
This is, if anything, less fun than it sounds. You basically glove up, slather your fingers with lube, and work them up the pt’s back end until you encounter stool. Scoop what you can, work anything loose that you can, and stretch out the rectal muscle to stimulate the body’s “rectum full, evict tenants” impulses. Tiberius couldn’t be turned on his side for this, so I had to hoist up the boys, so to speak, and jam my hand back in there from the front side.
As I got to work, I felt floppy skin lap over my wrist, local anatomy returning to its accustomed position. Well, it’s not the first time someone’s balls have posed me an inconvenient barrier to their ass. This job can be undignified. I just didn’t look—this procedure is all about proprioception and sense of touch.
I got a handful on my first fishing trip. A little dig stim, and his rectum refilled; I pulled out pebbles and chunks and lumps shaped like knucklebones and tiny flecks of shit-granite the size of rice krispy cereal. My shoulders cramped up and my wrist was on fire by the time I took a break; at my side, the bucket I’d allotted for captured items contained a good double fistful of rock-hard desiccated shit.
An hour later I went digging again. This time I got pebbles with a little slushy liquid. Things were breaking free.
An hour after that I got nothing with the finger sweep, but during the dig stim portion he started having a tremendous bowel movement. I’m talking liters of liquid shit. It flowed and poured and could not be contained, and with each surge of excrement, his blood pressure rose and his heart rate fell.
All told, I think he shit about a gallon, roughly four liters. Enough that I was able to turn him when it was time to clean him. Enough that his family, who have a high tolerance for medical grossness after decades of hospital stays and multiple family members who’ve suffered terrible diseases, blanched and gently shuffled out of the room.
It’s weird to write about that, because I so frequently write about shit torrents with the perverse delight of someone sharing that video from The Ring, but in this case the endless bowel movement has a totally different meaning. It means less pressure on the heart, less vomiting, less compression of his remaining lung, less risk of crashing and even death when we move him. It means the surgery can be performed with better access, since he can lie on his side without his guts crushing the breath out of him. It means Tiberius has a fighting chance.
Slowly his blood pressure continued to improve, reaching a plateau where it took about two-thirds the amount of pressors to keep him trucking along. Slowly the color came back into his cheeks. I worked up a genuine bouncing excitement.
Let me tell you, though, at the end of this stretch of shifts, all the extra moving and turning—all the tight attention to detail and moment-by-moment control-freaking—and, oh my god, the emotional support for family? I was so exhausted I slept over the end of my break and, an hour later, told my neighbor to watch my pts while I took a dump… then slept on a sheet in the bathroom floor, something I haven’t done since I was a night shift MICU nurse in Texas.
In Texas, which has no nursing union, breaks are “if you’re lucky” and “thirty minutes per twelve-hour shift” and “absolutely no leaving campus to pick up a burger at the all-night fast food joint, stay in the break room.” The unit I worked on, bizarrely, had a strict no-sleeping policy to boot, which meant that if you were nodding off at 0300 and you found someone to cover your pts so you could wolf your lunch in the thirty minutes you were allotted, you still had to stay awake in the tiny stuffy closet-sized break room the whole time. Falling asleep could mean a severe reprimand, or even an immediate termination. I don’t know how the fuck they expected patients to survive with their nurses either nodding off at the syringe or cranked up on stimulants nastier than caffeine.
I spent a lot of ten-minute dump breaks passed out on a bathroom floor. I will never live in Texas again.
When I moved to my current state, which is unionized, I came back from break still chewing my salad, only to be given a weird look and instructions from my preceptor to go back and take the rest of my break. Turns out, that facility usually takes a fifteen-minute morning break and a forty-five-minute lunch break; others keep the lunch break at thirty minutes, but add a fifteen-minute afternoon break. Night shifters often pool their breaks to get an hour, or even an hour and fifteen minutes if your facility rolls that way. And you can sleep. God, you can sleep.
So I sleep on most of my breaks, even now that I work days. I steal five-minute chunks with a coworker keeping an eye on my pts, cram my food into my mouth, then take a proper break to snore and drool on the break room sofa. It’s amazing.
But man, Tiberius wore me out.
Since I was only working an eight, I wrapped up early, and at afternoon shift change I started giving report while the evening RT went in to check his vent settings. A few minutes later his alarms started going off: oxygen desaturation, bombing blood pressure, volumes and pressures on the ventilator messed up. I had removed his lidocaine patch from his left shoulder a little while before, so I was freshly familiar with that part of him, and I immediately spotted the way his shoulder was ballooning up.
The tension pneumo was back with a vengeance. Air was pushing up through his flesh, inflating him with tiny bubbles that crackled where I pressed his skin; his chest tube wasn’t tidaling at all. (Tidaling refers to the rise and fall of water in the tube’s suction chamber, which shows that there’s a pressure change in the tube as he breathes in and out—that is, that the tube is still sucking air appropriately.)
The prickly pulm who’d been stripping his tubes wasn’t around today. The current pulm was not comfortable stripping the tube, especially considering that he didn’t know exactly how she’d done it before, and didn’t know that things would continue to work that way. I called the CT surgeon, and soon the one who’d done the initial pulmonectomy was at the bedside with the lanky PA, Pilgrim, to place another chest tube.
Just as this happened, the charge nurse asked if I could admit in the room next door. “Extremely no,” I said. “I’m supposed to be clocked out. Do you know where the chest tube cart is?”
The flex RN, a sort of all-hands troubleshooter who (at this facility) works like a dog all day, ended up landing that pt. I don’t even remember what her deal was, although I took report on her while the flex wrapped up her other duties, then passed off report during the chest tube insertion. I think she was hypotensive.
They had paired him with a second pt for the night shift nurse, which seemed cruel and unusual, since the other pt was having confusion and agitation issues and needed a sitter. The night sitter hadn’t shown up yet—was late, I think—and the day sitter had to leave to pick up her kids, so the oncoming RN sat with (and blasted with Haldol) the agitated pt while I dove in with the chest tube team.
I was okay with this, because if things started going south, I wanted someone there that knew the little nuances of his issues and could milk his pressors and sedatives for all they were worth. And I wasn’t done giving report on him yet.
Pilgrim pulled the old chest tube, and they popped in another, which released the pressure with a huge pink-spattered whoosh before I could hook it up to the atrium. Tiberius tolerated all of this remarkably well, and the duo marveled as they cleaned up that they couldn’t believe he’d made it through this latest setback and had halfway expected him to die while they were putting in the new tube.
I thought about the bedful of shit and felt extremely smug.
Then I finished cleaning the room, because CT surgeons performing a bedside procedure tend to tear up your room like a teenager’s mom looking for skin mags, and lurched out into the hallway. The family was in the middle of an impromptu conference with the pulm and CT docs, white-faced and tightly nodding.
“We’re going to finish the thoracotomy tomorrow morning at seven,” said the pulmonologist. “He can’t take many more setbacks. I think he’s about as good now as he’s going to get, and if we don’t do this tomorrow, unfortunately he will decline and probably die within the next few days.”
His wife took a couple of deep breaths before she could speak. “What are his chances in surgery?”
“About fifty-fifty. Unfortunately, he’s had a very hard course with this disease and I don’t think we can give him better than that.”
Physicians use the word ‘unfortunately’ a lot. Like ‘discomfort’, it’s a way of recognizing that someone is suffering when you’re so accustomed to human suffering that it’s hard to get a good perspective on this particular case. Unfortunately, ma’am, your son passed last night. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think he suffered much. Were you expecting it? Was it kind of a surprise? God, I have no idea. He’s dead, unfortunately.
I packed up my stuff, checked on Tiberius, clocked out, checked on Tiberius again, and left through the waiting room, where his family was gathered. I don’t like hugging pts or their family, because generally the hospital is a gross place and I have issues with being hugged by people I haven’t learned to trust, but I hugged them all. They were all crying, and I may have shed a few tears on my way out.
I made it home with a blank face, listening to podcasts about charlatan magicians, and started chopping vegetables and rolling them up in foil to be roasted over the campfire all weekend. You’re not supposed to take your work home with you, because it will make you crazy, but sometimes you really can’t avoid it.
You’d think it’s the tragic cases, the young people unceremoniously cut down, or the old folks dying alone and slow because their family can’t translate their love into letting them go; but man, the ones that get to me are the ones where I put in real work. His chances are slim to none, but by God I’ve squeezed those chances for every drop of advantage I can get, and it’s been exhausting and terrifying and edge-of-my-seat the whole way. I haven’t even let his family see, really, how close he is to death at every moment, how often some small setback has made me scramble. They know he’s not likely to make it; no reason to torture them with the constant surge and retreat of miniature battles and victories and losses. But every moment in that room, for me, was a challenge: not to panic when things went wrong, not to lose focus when things became tedious, not to slack off and cut corners and take risks, not to forget to be a person and care for the family as well.
And now he’s out of my hands. I will be out in the woods, out beyond phone reception, for the next five days. I am going from the front lines to a position of complete helplessness, and it put jagged edges on all my chopped vegetables and set my molars grinding. For a few hours, standing in my kitchen, I got to experience the corner of what his family must be feeling—he is in such a precarious place, teetering on the edge, and I have to rely on others to be conscientious and critical and skilled for his sake.
I have to remember that, even if everything goes perfectly right and everyone performs flawlessly, he will probably still die.
I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight.
“Uh,” I said. I hadn’t had any coffee yet. “I work here?”
“You aren’t scheduled today,” said the charge nurse. “The book says you’re on vacation.”
I considered this for way, way longer than I should have. I was leaving the next morning at the crack of dawn, headed out to the Olympic Peninsula for a weekend of camping with my husband, one of my closest friends (whose wife, my other closest friend, was stuck in town for the weekend with houseguests), and my friends’ ridiculously adorable kid, the 2.5yo. I hadn’t packed yet, had done minimal food prep, and hadn’t slept worth shit for a week because I was worried about Tiberius.
“So… should I go home?”
“No no no no! Don’t go anywhere! Can you stay? You’ll get your pt back. Don’t go anywhere.”
Just then my unit manager arrived. “What’s all the shouting about,” he said, then spotted me and pulled a double take. “I thought you were camping!”
“That’s tomorrow,” I said. “If I stay until three, can I go home?”
So I ended up working a measly eight hours today, which was a blessed relief, because Tiberius was gearing up for a Hail Mary surgery first thing tomorrow morning and needed every delicate fine-tuning touch I could give him. The pulms and CT surgeons agreed: the repeated chest tube occlusions and stump perforations were taking far too much of a toll on his limited resources, and the still-sort-of-open thoracotomy was starting to dehisce. The ARDS is beginning to retreat, but he’s still hanging on the edge, and his cardiac output is consistently in the trash because of the insane pressure differential in the various parts of his chest.
My job today was to give him every inch of gained ground I could fight for. I titrated down his pressors with extreme care, just low enough to give wiggle room in case they had to crank ‘em up in surgery, not low enough to challenge him. I talked plans with the pulm, and got orders for albumin (to pull water in from the tissues) and Lasix (to shed the water, reducing the heart’s afterload, the amount of back-pressure it’s pushing against as it tries to perfuse the tissues). I timed them with exquisite care and pulled this stunt three times in a row without rocking his vital signs, before finally chickening out of Round 4 because his heart rate went up ten points.
And I started working really hard on his bowels.
Tiberius was backed up as all hell. I think I mentioned before that his distended colon was causing pressure issues with his heart and his venous return; I took it on myself to get that shit out of there, and championed the cause of poop until I’m pretty sure Dr Sunny worried about my sanity. I dosed him with bowel meds; I administered enemas; I finally, in a fit of desperation, gloved up to the wrists and performed digital disimpaction and stimulation of his rectum.
This is, if anything, less fun than it sounds. You basically glove up, slather your fingers with lube, and work them up the pt’s back end until you encounter stool. Scoop what you can, work anything loose that you can, and stretch out the rectal muscle to stimulate the body’s “rectum full, evict tenants” impulses. Tiberius couldn’t be turned on his side for this, so I had to hoist up the boys, so to speak, and jam my hand back in there from the front side.
As I got to work, I felt floppy skin lap over my wrist, local anatomy returning to its accustomed position. Well, it’s not the first time someone’s balls have posed me an inconvenient barrier to their ass. This job can be undignified. I just didn’t look—this procedure is all about proprioception and sense of touch.
I got a handful on my first fishing trip. A little dig stim, and his rectum refilled; I pulled out pebbles and chunks and lumps shaped like knucklebones and tiny flecks of shit-granite the size of rice krispy cereal. My shoulders cramped up and my wrist was on fire by the time I took a break; at my side, the bucket I’d allotted for captured items contained a good double fistful of rock-hard desiccated shit.
An hour later I went digging again. This time I got pebbles with a little slushy liquid. Things were breaking free.
An hour after that I got nothing with the finger sweep, but during the dig stim portion he started having a tremendous bowel movement. I’m talking liters of liquid shit. It flowed and poured and could not be contained, and with each surge of excrement, his blood pressure rose and his heart rate fell.
All told, I think he shit about a gallon, roughly four liters. Enough that I was able to turn him when it was time to clean him. Enough that his family, who have a high tolerance for medical grossness after decades of hospital stays and multiple family members who’ve suffered terrible diseases, blanched and gently shuffled out of the room.
It’s weird to write about that, because I so frequently write about shit torrents with the perverse delight of someone sharing that video from The Ring, but in this case the endless bowel movement has a totally different meaning. It means less pressure on the heart, less vomiting, less compression of his remaining lung, less risk of crashing and even death when we move him. It means the surgery can be performed with better access, since he can lie on his side without his guts crushing the breath out of him. It means Tiberius has a fighting chance.
Slowly his blood pressure continued to improve, reaching a plateau where it took about two-thirds the amount of pressors to keep him trucking along. Slowly the color came back into his cheeks. I worked up a genuine bouncing excitement.
Let me tell you, though, at the end of this stretch of shifts, all the extra moving and turning—all the tight attention to detail and moment-by-moment control-freaking—and, oh my god, the emotional support for family? I was so exhausted I slept over the end of my break and, an hour later, told my neighbor to watch my pts while I took a dump… then slept on a sheet in the bathroom floor, something I haven’t done since I was a night shift MICU nurse in Texas.
In Texas, which has no nursing union, breaks are “if you’re lucky” and “thirty minutes per twelve-hour shift” and “absolutely no leaving campus to pick up a burger at the all-night fast food joint, stay in the break room.” The unit I worked on, bizarrely, had a strict no-sleeping policy to boot, which meant that if you were nodding off at 0300 and you found someone to cover your pts so you could wolf your lunch in the thirty minutes you were allotted, you still had to stay awake in the tiny stuffy closet-sized break room the whole time. Falling asleep could mean a severe reprimand, or even an immediate termination. I don’t know how the fuck they expected patients to survive with their nurses either nodding off at the syringe or cranked up on stimulants nastier than caffeine.
I spent a lot of ten-minute dump breaks passed out on a bathroom floor. I will never live in Texas again.
When I moved to my current state, which is unionized, I came back from break still chewing my salad, only to be given a weird look and instructions from my preceptor to go back and take the rest of my break. Turns out, that facility usually takes a fifteen-minute morning break and a forty-five-minute lunch break; others keep the lunch break at thirty minutes, but add a fifteen-minute afternoon break. Night shifters often pool their breaks to get an hour, or even an hour and fifteen minutes if your facility rolls that way. And you can sleep. God, you can sleep.
So I sleep on most of my breaks, even now that I work days. I steal five-minute chunks with a coworker keeping an eye on my pts, cram my food into my mouth, then take a proper break to snore and drool on the break room sofa. It’s amazing.
But man, Tiberius wore me out.
Since I was only working an eight, I wrapped up early, and at afternoon shift change I started giving report while the evening RT went in to check his vent settings. A few minutes later his alarms started going off: oxygen desaturation, bombing blood pressure, volumes and pressures on the ventilator messed up. I had removed his lidocaine patch from his left shoulder a little while before, so I was freshly familiar with that part of him, and I immediately spotted the way his shoulder was ballooning up.
The tension pneumo was back with a vengeance. Air was pushing up through his flesh, inflating him with tiny bubbles that crackled where I pressed his skin; his chest tube wasn’t tidaling at all. (Tidaling refers to the rise and fall of water in the tube’s suction chamber, which shows that there’s a pressure change in the tube as he breathes in and out—that is, that the tube is still sucking air appropriately.)
The prickly pulm who’d been stripping his tubes wasn’t around today. The current pulm was not comfortable stripping the tube, especially considering that he didn’t know exactly how she’d done it before, and didn’t know that things would continue to work that way. I called the CT surgeon, and soon the one who’d done the initial pulmonectomy was at the bedside with the lanky PA, Pilgrim, to place another chest tube.
Just as this happened, the charge nurse asked if I could admit in the room next door. “Extremely no,” I said. “I’m supposed to be clocked out. Do you know where the chest tube cart is?”
The flex RN, a sort of all-hands troubleshooter who (at this facility) works like a dog all day, ended up landing that pt. I don’t even remember what her deal was, although I took report on her while the flex wrapped up her other duties, then passed off report during the chest tube insertion. I think she was hypotensive.
They had paired him with a second pt for the night shift nurse, which seemed cruel and unusual, since the other pt was having confusion and agitation issues and needed a sitter. The night sitter hadn’t shown up yet—was late, I think—and the day sitter had to leave to pick up her kids, so the oncoming RN sat with (and blasted with Haldol) the agitated pt while I dove in with the chest tube team.
I was okay with this, because if things started going south, I wanted someone there that knew the little nuances of his issues and could milk his pressors and sedatives for all they were worth. And I wasn’t done giving report on him yet.
Pilgrim pulled the old chest tube, and they popped in another, which released the pressure with a huge pink-spattered whoosh before I could hook it up to the atrium. Tiberius tolerated all of this remarkably well, and the duo marveled as they cleaned up that they couldn’t believe he’d made it through this latest setback and had halfway expected him to die while they were putting in the new tube.
I thought about the bedful of shit and felt extremely smug.
Then I finished cleaning the room, because CT surgeons performing a bedside procedure tend to tear up your room like a teenager’s mom looking for skin mags, and lurched out into the hallway. The family was in the middle of an impromptu conference with the pulm and CT docs, white-faced and tightly nodding.
“We’re going to finish the thoracotomy tomorrow morning at seven,” said the pulmonologist. “He can’t take many more setbacks. I think he’s about as good now as he’s going to get, and if we don’t do this tomorrow, unfortunately he will decline and probably die within the next few days.”
His wife took a couple of deep breaths before she could speak. “What are his chances in surgery?”
“About fifty-fifty. Unfortunately, he’s had a very hard course with this disease and I don’t think we can give him better than that.”
Physicians use the word ‘unfortunately’ a lot. Like ‘discomfort’, it’s a way of recognizing that someone is suffering when you’re so accustomed to human suffering that it’s hard to get a good perspective on this particular case. Unfortunately, ma’am, your son passed last night. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think he suffered much. Were you expecting it? Was it kind of a surprise? God, I have no idea. He’s dead, unfortunately.
I packed up my stuff, checked on Tiberius, clocked out, checked on Tiberius again, and left through the waiting room, where his family was gathered. I don’t like hugging pts or their family, because generally the hospital is a gross place and I have issues with being hugged by people I haven’t learned to trust, but I hugged them all. They were all crying, and I may have shed a few tears on my way out.
I made it home with a blank face, listening to podcasts about charlatan magicians, and started chopping vegetables and rolling them up in foil to be roasted over the campfire all weekend. You’re not supposed to take your work home with you, because it will make you crazy, but sometimes you really can’t avoid it.
You’d think it’s the tragic cases, the young people unceremoniously cut down, or the old folks dying alone and slow because their family can’t translate their love into letting them go; but man, the ones that get to me are the ones where I put in real work. His chances are slim to none, but by God I’ve squeezed those chances for every drop of advantage I can get, and it’s been exhausting and terrifying and edge-of-my-seat the whole way. I haven’t even let his family see, really, how close he is to death at every moment, how often some small setback has made me scramble. They know he’s not likely to make it; no reason to torture them with the constant surge and retreat of miniature battles and victories and losses. But every moment in that room, for me, was a challenge: not to panic when things went wrong, not to lose focus when things became tedious, not to slack off and cut corners and take risks, not to forget to be a person and care for the family as well.
And now he’s out of my hands. I will be out in the woods, out beyond phone reception, for the next five days. I am going from the front lines to a position of complete helplessness, and it put jagged edges on all my chopped vegetables and set my molars grinding. For a few hours, standing in my kitchen, I got to experience the corner of what his family must be feeling—he is in such a precarious place, teetering on the edge, and I have to rely on others to be conscientious and critical and skilled for his sake.
I have to remember that, even if everything goes perfectly right and everyone performs flawlessly, he will probably still die.
I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight.
Friday, July 17, 2015
Week Five Please Send Help Too Much Work
Thursday I rolled into work around 1045, having juggled my hours to accommodate the concert. Getting out at 1500 on Wed was just enough time to let me stagger home, wash my gross self, nap for an hour, and put on some real-people clothes before the festivities commenced. Coming back in at 1100 on Thurs let me sleep in, which I desperately needed (and still need, and will always need even when I don’t get it). So I was well-rested, well-fed, and wearing my best work pajamas when I showed up at the nurses’ station and asked about my assignment.
Charge nurse put on a very serious face and asked if I would be comfortable getting oriented to hearts at this facility today.
Open hearts are a big deal, the moneymaker of any ICU that does them. Nurses that take fresh open heart recoveries are rigorously trained, tested, precepted, and even given classroom time on the unit’s dollar to make sure they’re fully equipped. Heart pts are delicate, touchy, and heavily regulated, but a really sharp RN with lots of training can keep everything moving smoothly despite the inevitable hiccups. I had not taken a fresh open heart in something like nine months, because even a few months before I left my last facility, the open-heart program became a dangerous place for a relatively inexperienced nurse.
A second-day heart pt had been assigned to a non-heart night nurse due to understaffing, with the idea that the heart-certified charge nurse would be able to back her up and keep things running smoothly. Instead, the pt lost conduction (valve replacements often do, though it’s less common for this to happen on the second or third days) and dropped their heartbeat completely. They ended up coding her for almost thirty minutes before someone thought to hook up her pacemaker, and after thirty more minutes without success they called the code.
The charge nurse was hung out to dry, and retired to PACU a few months later. The unfortunate unit nurse assigned to the pt was scapegoated roundly, despite having never been trained on hearts and therefore lacking the reflex to hook up the pacer to the V-wires sticking out of the pt’s chest. Every hiccup in every recovery for the next six months was scrutinized, written up, and presented “in a meeting” between managerial staff and the heart nurse in question. Everyone on the unit was trained in temporary pacer management, but when the heart RNs requested additional training to address the hiccups that were obviously such a big problem now, they were given no more education—just stripped of autonomy and grilled after every case.
I voluntarily removed myself from the heart list. Which is sad, because I fucking love hearts. They are a huge rush and the detail and precision and reflex required is a serious, galvanizing challenge. There’s also an element of prestige to the open heart program, which I like because I am a bit shallow and vain. Succeeding at the challenge makes me feel like a Real Nurse instead of the secret imposter I usually feel like I am.
The imposter thing is a huge deal in my life. Even writing this diary is kind of terrifying to me, because I know that I’m getting some things wrong and there are probably people shaking their heads and wondering why I suck so bad. I’ve worked ICU since 2008 and I still regularly encounter things that make me feel like a clueless kid wearing borrowed scrubs, things I should have known but didn’t, moments of dumb that make me cringe for months. I am deeply afraid of appearing stupid or uneducated or incompetent. One of the hardest things in my practice is recovering rusty skills—things I used to do well, but which I haven’t done for a while, and which I might be expected to perform competently but will probably make mistakes with. I am constantly ashamed of myself, and sometimes this makes me defensive or aggressive when I really shouldn’t be.
Mostly I channel it into fighting my innate laziness. I don’t want to look like a piece of shit nurse who can’t do anything without her hand being held, so I constantly educate myself, refresh my skills, pay attention to the details, and attend to the shitty boring jobs as well as the exciting flashy ones.
So taking this heart pt was very important to me, and although my shamepanic drive geared up for a beating, I accepted the assignment. As a psychological incentive, there was also an element of the unit really needing a few more heart nurses—my other great fear is abandonment, which means that I am at my most comfortable and secure when I feel necessary. It’s vital that I keep that impulse in check, because a hospital will chew you up and spit you out if you can’t resist the phrase “we really need you.” And nobody in a hospital is truly indispensable, so at some point in every work situation I will inevitably encounter the truth that I will never be perfect and that perfection is not required for me to be valuable. But I allow myself a few smug moments sometimes to enjoy my employers’ gratitude and/or relief, just as I occasionally remind myself that if I don’t get my job done right, I will get in just as much trouble as the next nurse down the hall.
My value is earned, and if I fuck around and make messes, other people are entitled to avoid me—which means that the approval and security I crave is a predictable resource I can expect if I fulfill certain realistic expectations, and am entitled to demand if it’s inappropriately withheld.
There was a time when I handled things with much less self-awareness. Approval and love were like an endless series of rocks thrown into the emotional well of my insecurity, each little splash a momentary fix, while the whole time I acted like a crazy person, trying to drive the source of approval away to “prove” that my fears were legitimate and that the splashes would stop coming. I was an incredibly challenging person to care about. I think the only reason I finally escaped that personality hellhole was that I got into nursing, where my value was measured in life and death and hourly wage. It’s hard to lie to yourself about patient outcomes.
I’m pretty sure nursing saved my life.
I’m also pretty sure this diary is not at its best when I’m navel-gazing in it. Lo siento, my friends.
Anyway, Mavi*, one of the best heart nurses on the unit, offered to be my second/preceptor for the day. She is a tiny Filipina woman with beastly skills, ice-cold reflexes, and the kind of gentle, humorous nursing style that makes everyone around her comfortable and happy.
We prepared the room and sat down to get me oriented to the paperwork and charting. Every fresh heart has a primary nurse (in this case, me) and a second (Mavi), with distinct roles in the recovery process—there is a hell of a lot of work to do during those first few hours. Every facility documents its hearts a little differently, and every surgeon has their own preferences and quirks, and every heart nurse needs to get familiar with the details very quickly so they can be second nature by the time they’re making decisions about which medication to start.
This surgeon doesn’t like SCDs (leg massager pumps used to prevent blood clots from forming), prefers to be texted rather than paged, dislikes high doses of epinephrine used as a pressor, and is blazing fast at his job. He also plays jazz guitar, was once an aerospace engineer (his first career), and is in active military duty through some branch or other. I was a little intimidated, to be honest. Mavi put the surgeon’s number in my phone while we looked over the procedural chart for landing a fresh heart, which she wrote a while back and which has become official paperwork because it rocks.
Off-pump call came about four hours after surgery started, which was incredible, considering that the guy had a valve replaced (requires cutting into the heart itself), a coronary artery bypass graft (CABG, requires harvesting a vein or artery from somewhere else in the body), and a double MAZE procedure (a labyrinth of burn scars in both atria to prevent atrial fibrillation). This is a whole lot of stuff to have done in a single surgery, let alone in a mere four hours of surgery.
Elevator call is typically an hour after off-pump call. Once the pt is taken off the bypass pump and their heart is restarted, the team still needs to close the chest and perform a few other little tune-ups, then watch the pt until they’re satisfied that he’s stable. Then they give one last notification to the ICU and load the whole crew into the elevator. So the pt arrived, intubated and still working off the anesthesia, with a churning nest of OR nurses, techs, and anesthetologists squirming all over him. Mavi hooked him up to monitors while I checked on his chest tubes; Mavi drew up his initial labs while I charted until my eyes started to sweat. Mavi performed foley care; I ran hemodynamics through his swann catheter, checking on the function of his various cardiac components. I listened to his heart and lungs—this is especially important in valve surgeries, since a valve problem will usually be audible as a murmur—and Mavi examined his pacer wires and vent settings.
He was atrially paced. Many valve pts come back with their pacer wires hooked up and firing, either by directly stimulating the ventricles (the big chambers at the bottom of the heart, the ones with all the kick) or by starting the electric cascade in the atria (the little chambers whose job is mostly to pack extra blood into the big chambers and stretch them out bigger so they can beat harder). Some surgeons prefer to let the ventricles fill on their own and just pace from the ventricles themselves. In valve surgery, the actual heart itself is cut and the nerves are very unhappy, especially the nerves responsible for relaying messages from the atria (where each beat starts) down to the ventricles (where the beat ends with a big push). Angry, swollen, shocky nerves don’t relay impulses well, and thus any beat that starts at the top of the heart—whether natural or atrially paced—may not get conducted all the way to the bottom.
But that atrial kick gets a lot more mileage out of each beat. Imagine holding a water balloon in your fist, and squeezing it until it pops. If the balloon was filled just by dunking the empty balloon into a bucket of water, it won’t have much water inside, and your fist will have to squeeze really hard to pop the balloon. But if you hooked the same balloon up to a water hose and filled it until it was ready to pop in the first place, the balloon itself wants to return to its original shape—it has mechanical elasticity, and your fist only has to work a little to make it pop. In this case, the ‘pop’ is the force of perfusing your entire body with blood, and the water hose is the atrial kick that forces extra blood into your ventricles. So atrial pacing is a great place to start a cardiac pt. If you lose conduction, you can always hook up the ventricular pacer wires and stimulate beats that way.
His blood pressure and cardiac output, of course, started to drop very quickly. The recently-cut heart is stiff and shocky and stressed out, and its walls don’t want to move very well. Plus, the body is reacting to the insult of being cut up and partially exsanguinated by shifting fluid around its various spaces, pulling water out of the blood into the tissues where it’s mostly useless except to swell up and make you look puffy. So we administer fluids, to replenish the thirsty bloodstream, and we administer albumin, which thickens up the blood (increases its osmolarity) to suck water back out of the tissues into the blood vessels.
To support the blood pressure, we use several different medications by steady drip. I am pretty used to using dobutamine as a front-line inotrope—that is, the first drug I turn to when I need to stimulate the heart to squeeze harder instead of faster. This surgeon, however, prefers epinephrine, aka adrenaline, which both speeds the heart (a chronotrope) and increases its contractility (an inotrope). As the pt’s recovery continued, we shifted from the fluid-moving phase to the vasodilation phase, in which the body really wants to relax its veins and dump all its fluid into the tissues. Here we started using phenylephrine, also known as neosynephrine, which is a pure vasopressor—that is, it tightens up your blood vessels, and doesn’t affect the workings of your heart. In the same way that you get higher pressure by squirting water through a straw than through a hose with the same force, tighter blood vessels increase pressure… although they resist the heart’s beats a little harder.
One of the other big bad pressors, norepinephrine/noradrenaline, is also known as Levophed… or, in ICU parlance, leave-‘em-dead. It will squeeze the living shit out of your blood vessels until your toes drop off, which is what happened to my CRRT lady a while back. If you find yourself using norepi on a cardiac surgery pt, something has gone extremely wrong. The other two pressors, vasopressin and dopamine, I will probably talk about later, when I have a pt I’m using them on.
Within about two hours of his arrival on the unit, he awakened enough from general anesthesia that he could open his eyes, lift his head, and follow commands, so we pulled out his breathing tube and let him breathe on his own. A little morphine for pain, a few ice chips for his dry throat, and he was happy as a clam in sauce.
He was also convinced that I spoke exclusively German, and was courteous enough to speak exclusively German to me. I do not speak German at all, so occasionally I would rattle back at him in hospital Spanish (I cut my ICU teeth in Texas) and he would recoil, startled. He is a world traveler and historian and as he came back to his senses throughout the afternoon he and I had many wonderful conversations in English. Any time he drifted off though, he would wake up, look at me, and start speaking German again.
Man, I don’t know. I don’t even look German. I have enormous bushy brown hair, a prominent forehead, freckles, glasses, and the kind of sloppily-assembled facial features you get from slightly inbred trailer trash that grew up in the river bottom. I look like leftover tax dodger and piney-woods moonshiner and hastily concealed ancestor ethnicity back when Irish was considered ‘ethnic’. I am white as shit, but not in the classy-lookin’ European way, is what I’m saying. Four years ago, before suffering my way through braces, I had buck teeth.
I’m not exactly pretty, but fuckin hell man, I don’t have to be. I am the apocalyptic definition of ‘personality hot’. I’m the lady equivalent of that weird-lookin fucker on TV that’s sixty years old and worryingly asymmetrical in the face parts and could bang your girlfriend in the bathroom at your favorite bar after five minutes of conversation. I am also incredibly arrogant and don’t speak a word of German. It’s quite possible that he was just telling me how my face is so gnarly it’s giving him flashbacks to WWII.
We joked a little about our respective experiences with foreign languages, and he taught me a little about the ways in which Italian deviates from Spanish. I taught him to say “qapla’.” I can’t help but feel that I got the better end of that deal.
Anyway, linguistic barriers aside, by the time we had this guy settled down and feeling pretty good, I had an imperial shit-ton of charting to get done, so Mavi watched him for a bit while I had lunch and then tore into the paperwork. The surgeon came by to see how the guy was doing, and I noticed that he was wearing an honest-to-god Starfleet insignia badge on his white coat, which after my earlier Klingon language lesson seemed like a much stranger coincidence than it probably was. We ended up having a nice chat about Star Trek, after which a couple of the RTs came up and started reminiscing about Jimmy Doohan, who apparently used to come to this hospital for pulmonary fibrosis because he lived nearby. (I would consider this HIPPA material except that it’s freely available information from Wikipedia.) He was apparently funny and personable, hated being called “Scotty,” and once left AMA because he hadn’t had any alone time with his wife in a week.
The RTs apparently thought very highly of his wife, who was much younger than him but who genuinely seemed to care about him and connect with him on a personal level. “They were great people,” said the surgeon. “I was always a little intimidated by him though.” Then he started talking about how his engineering career was spurred by his love of Star Trek, and how he missed NASA because he had felt like a member of a modern-day Starfleet there. I turned into a brick of shy-terror and finished my charting in record time.
After that, we got my pt sitting up on the edge of the bed so his feet could dangle, reminding him to hug his heart-shaped splint pillow tightly to relieve tension on his chest, then popped him back into bed and tidied up the room for the next shift. He was scheduled for at least one more major exercise activity, probably an hour sitting in a recliner, before bedtime. Exercise is critical to the early recovery phase; a pt who lies in bed the whole time will have nasty consequences. Lungs collapse and close up and fill with fluid; chest tubes clot off, and fluid builds up around the heart; blood clots up in the legs and causes pain and swelling, with a huge risk of pulmonary embolism; and the whole body misses the opportunity to tune itself up after the surgery, leading to increased swelling, decreased cardiac output, and severe constipation.
Tomorrow he’ll walk around the unit four times, and spend at least half the day in a chair. After that we’ll really start pushing. His case will be a smooth one, barring any major unanticipated events, and he’ll probably go home in a week or two. Before the surgery he couldn’t walk without collapsing because his heart was too starved for oxygen and too backed up from his scarred-up valve; when he gets home, lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise, he’ll be able to stroll around the park and even do some gentle gardening.
Other things that happened today…
The screaming lady died. Her ammonia poisoning—hepatic encephalopathy—became so intense that she could no longer speak or make eye contact, and she laid in bed thrashing and groaning in horrible garbled sentences of fragmented non-words as if demons had crawled into her skull and were eating everything inside it. Her family stopped going into the room at all, and huddled outside in knots of two and three, weeping. Palliative care approached gingerly, having been rebuffed many times before, and her closest relative made the decision without even having to be asked.
“Let her go,” he said. “She’s not even really alive anymore.”
We took the fem-stop pressure dressing off her leg, and she bled out and died within five minutes. The absence of her screams was sickening for the first half-hour; then hospital silence seeped into the cracks, a weird relief.
In the car on the way home from a shift, you forget to turn on the radio, you forget that you were going to make that phone call—you soak in the lack of alarms, the lack of dinging and beeping and chiming and clanging. It’s like breathing after you resurface from the water, at first. Your eardrums feel like somebody is pressing on them, blunting out the constant bells you know must still be ringing. Then, as other small daily sounds creep in at the edges, you forget what it was that you were supposed to be hearing. The white hum of road noise, the whoosh and rumble, disappears beneath the sounds of the car passing you in the other lane, the click of your blinker, the subvocalization of the gearshift, the creak of your knee as you depress the clutch and wonder why the fuck you can’t just give up your dignity and buy an automatic for the commute. You remember that you downloaded the new episode of that podcast, and hook your phone up with one hand, and dig that last Kit-Kat bar out of your purse to devour while you drive. By the time you reach your home, the endless litany of alarms is not only missing but forgotten.
That’s how it was with her screaming. An hour after she died, we were all cursing under our breath about the one guy whose monitor kept false-alarming. I almost forgot she had been alive just that afternoon.
We also got in two pediatric cases. Okay, teenagers. One was in a car wreck and had mashed up his legs, but was expected to recover, although his entire family was shaken and white-faced. The other was involved in a drowning incident; his mother had seen him go underwater and not come up, and although there was a nurse nearby who started CPR as soon as they could pull him up, he had inhaled a fuck-ton of lake water. His mother was a complete wreck, and understandably so, but very optimistic and desperately hopeful that he would wake up soon.
We’ve had a few drowning cases. Everyone is keeping a politely neutral face, and of course we’re doing everything we can, but (because I’m writing this a few days later) I can tell you that on Friday he had his first code blue as his lungs succumbed to the inevitable damage of lake aspiration, and that today he’s in a rotoprone bed, seizing.
He might yet make it. Maybe. It’s a long shot. Either way, I’ll be here every day through Wednesday, so if he dies I have about a 50% chance of being here for it.
Charge nurse put on a very serious face and asked if I would be comfortable getting oriented to hearts at this facility today.
Open hearts are a big deal, the moneymaker of any ICU that does them. Nurses that take fresh open heart recoveries are rigorously trained, tested, precepted, and even given classroom time on the unit’s dollar to make sure they’re fully equipped. Heart pts are delicate, touchy, and heavily regulated, but a really sharp RN with lots of training can keep everything moving smoothly despite the inevitable hiccups. I had not taken a fresh open heart in something like nine months, because even a few months before I left my last facility, the open-heart program became a dangerous place for a relatively inexperienced nurse.
A second-day heart pt had been assigned to a non-heart night nurse due to understaffing, with the idea that the heart-certified charge nurse would be able to back her up and keep things running smoothly. Instead, the pt lost conduction (valve replacements often do, though it’s less common for this to happen on the second or third days) and dropped their heartbeat completely. They ended up coding her for almost thirty minutes before someone thought to hook up her pacemaker, and after thirty more minutes without success they called the code.
The charge nurse was hung out to dry, and retired to PACU a few months later. The unfortunate unit nurse assigned to the pt was scapegoated roundly, despite having never been trained on hearts and therefore lacking the reflex to hook up the pacer to the V-wires sticking out of the pt’s chest. Every hiccup in every recovery for the next six months was scrutinized, written up, and presented “in a meeting” between managerial staff and the heart nurse in question. Everyone on the unit was trained in temporary pacer management, but when the heart RNs requested additional training to address the hiccups that were obviously such a big problem now, they were given no more education—just stripped of autonomy and grilled after every case.
I voluntarily removed myself from the heart list. Which is sad, because I fucking love hearts. They are a huge rush and the detail and precision and reflex required is a serious, galvanizing challenge. There’s also an element of prestige to the open heart program, which I like because I am a bit shallow and vain. Succeeding at the challenge makes me feel like a Real Nurse instead of the secret imposter I usually feel like I am.
The imposter thing is a huge deal in my life. Even writing this diary is kind of terrifying to me, because I know that I’m getting some things wrong and there are probably people shaking their heads and wondering why I suck so bad. I’ve worked ICU since 2008 and I still regularly encounter things that make me feel like a clueless kid wearing borrowed scrubs, things I should have known but didn’t, moments of dumb that make me cringe for months. I am deeply afraid of appearing stupid or uneducated or incompetent. One of the hardest things in my practice is recovering rusty skills—things I used to do well, but which I haven’t done for a while, and which I might be expected to perform competently but will probably make mistakes with. I am constantly ashamed of myself, and sometimes this makes me defensive or aggressive when I really shouldn’t be.
Mostly I channel it into fighting my innate laziness. I don’t want to look like a piece of shit nurse who can’t do anything without her hand being held, so I constantly educate myself, refresh my skills, pay attention to the details, and attend to the shitty boring jobs as well as the exciting flashy ones.
So taking this heart pt was very important to me, and although my shamepanic drive geared up for a beating, I accepted the assignment. As a psychological incentive, there was also an element of the unit really needing a few more heart nurses—my other great fear is abandonment, which means that I am at my most comfortable and secure when I feel necessary. It’s vital that I keep that impulse in check, because a hospital will chew you up and spit you out if you can’t resist the phrase “we really need you.” And nobody in a hospital is truly indispensable, so at some point in every work situation I will inevitably encounter the truth that I will never be perfect and that perfection is not required for me to be valuable. But I allow myself a few smug moments sometimes to enjoy my employers’ gratitude and/or relief, just as I occasionally remind myself that if I don’t get my job done right, I will get in just as much trouble as the next nurse down the hall.
My value is earned, and if I fuck around and make messes, other people are entitled to avoid me—which means that the approval and security I crave is a predictable resource I can expect if I fulfill certain realistic expectations, and am entitled to demand if it’s inappropriately withheld.
There was a time when I handled things with much less self-awareness. Approval and love were like an endless series of rocks thrown into the emotional well of my insecurity, each little splash a momentary fix, while the whole time I acted like a crazy person, trying to drive the source of approval away to “prove” that my fears were legitimate and that the splashes would stop coming. I was an incredibly challenging person to care about. I think the only reason I finally escaped that personality hellhole was that I got into nursing, where my value was measured in life and death and hourly wage. It’s hard to lie to yourself about patient outcomes.
I’m pretty sure nursing saved my life.
I’m also pretty sure this diary is not at its best when I’m navel-gazing in it. Lo siento, my friends.
Anyway, Mavi*, one of the best heart nurses on the unit, offered to be my second/preceptor for the day. She is a tiny Filipina woman with beastly skills, ice-cold reflexes, and the kind of gentle, humorous nursing style that makes everyone around her comfortable and happy.
We prepared the room and sat down to get me oriented to the paperwork and charting. Every fresh heart has a primary nurse (in this case, me) and a second (Mavi), with distinct roles in the recovery process—there is a hell of a lot of work to do during those first few hours. Every facility documents its hearts a little differently, and every surgeon has their own preferences and quirks, and every heart nurse needs to get familiar with the details very quickly so they can be second nature by the time they’re making decisions about which medication to start.
This surgeon doesn’t like SCDs (leg massager pumps used to prevent blood clots from forming), prefers to be texted rather than paged, dislikes high doses of epinephrine used as a pressor, and is blazing fast at his job. He also plays jazz guitar, was once an aerospace engineer (his first career), and is in active military duty through some branch or other. I was a little intimidated, to be honest. Mavi put the surgeon’s number in my phone while we looked over the procedural chart for landing a fresh heart, which she wrote a while back and which has become official paperwork because it rocks.
Off-pump call came about four hours after surgery started, which was incredible, considering that the guy had a valve replaced (requires cutting into the heart itself), a coronary artery bypass graft (CABG, requires harvesting a vein or artery from somewhere else in the body), and a double MAZE procedure (a labyrinth of burn scars in both atria to prevent atrial fibrillation). This is a whole lot of stuff to have done in a single surgery, let alone in a mere four hours of surgery.
Elevator call is typically an hour after off-pump call. Once the pt is taken off the bypass pump and their heart is restarted, the team still needs to close the chest and perform a few other little tune-ups, then watch the pt until they’re satisfied that he’s stable. Then they give one last notification to the ICU and load the whole crew into the elevator. So the pt arrived, intubated and still working off the anesthesia, with a churning nest of OR nurses, techs, and anesthetologists squirming all over him. Mavi hooked him up to monitors while I checked on his chest tubes; Mavi drew up his initial labs while I charted until my eyes started to sweat. Mavi performed foley care; I ran hemodynamics through his swann catheter, checking on the function of his various cardiac components. I listened to his heart and lungs—this is especially important in valve surgeries, since a valve problem will usually be audible as a murmur—and Mavi examined his pacer wires and vent settings.
He was atrially paced. Many valve pts come back with their pacer wires hooked up and firing, either by directly stimulating the ventricles (the big chambers at the bottom of the heart, the ones with all the kick) or by starting the electric cascade in the atria (the little chambers whose job is mostly to pack extra blood into the big chambers and stretch them out bigger so they can beat harder). Some surgeons prefer to let the ventricles fill on their own and just pace from the ventricles themselves. In valve surgery, the actual heart itself is cut and the nerves are very unhappy, especially the nerves responsible for relaying messages from the atria (where each beat starts) down to the ventricles (where the beat ends with a big push). Angry, swollen, shocky nerves don’t relay impulses well, and thus any beat that starts at the top of the heart—whether natural or atrially paced—may not get conducted all the way to the bottom.
But that atrial kick gets a lot more mileage out of each beat. Imagine holding a water balloon in your fist, and squeezing it until it pops. If the balloon was filled just by dunking the empty balloon into a bucket of water, it won’t have much water inside, and your fist will have to squeeze really hard to pop the balloon. But if you hooked the same balloon up to a water hose and filled it until it was ready to pop in the first place, the balloon itself wants to return to its original shape—it has mechanical elasticity, and your fist only has to work a little to make it pop. In this case, the ‘pop’ is the force of perfusing your entire body with blood, and the water hose is the atrial kick that forces extra blood into your ventricles. So atrial pacing is a great place to start a cardiac pt. If you lose conduction, you can always hook up the ventricular pacer wires and stimulate beats that way.
His blood pressure and cardiac output, of course, started to drop very quickly. The recently-cut heart is stiff and shocky and stressed out, and its walls don’t want to move very well. Plus, the body is reacting to the insult of being cut up and partially exsanguinated by shifting fluid around its various spaces, pulling water out of the blood into the tissues where it’s mostly useless except to swell up and make you look puffy. So we administer fluids, to replenish the thirsty bloodstream, and we administer albumin, which thickens up the blood (increases its osmolarity) to suck water back out of the tissues into the blood vessels.
To support the blood pressure, we use several different medications by steady drip. I am pretty used to using dobutamine as a front-line inotrope—that is, the first drug I turn to when I need to stimulate the heart to squeeze harder instead of faster. This surgeon, however, prefers epinephrine, aka adrenaline, which both speeds the heart (a chronotrope) and increases its contractility (an inotrope). As the pt’s recovery continued, we shifted from the fluid-moving phase to the vasodilation phase, in which the body really wants to relax its veins and dump all its fluid into the tissues. Here we started using phenylephrine, also known as neosynephrine, which is a pure vasopressor—that is, it tightens up your blood vessels, and doesn’t affect the workings of your heart. In the same way that you get higher pressure by squirting water through a straw than through a hose with the same force, tighter blood vessels increase pressure… although they resist the heart’s beats a little harder.
One of the other big bad pressors, norepinephrine/noradrenaline, is also known as Levophed… or, in ICU parlance, leave-‘em-dead. It will squeeze the living shit out of your blood vessels until your toes drop off, which is what happened to my CRRT lady a while back. If you find yourself using norepi on a cardiac surgery pt, something has gone extremely wrong. The other two pressors, vasopressin and dopamine, I will probably talk about later, when I have a pt I’m using them on.
Within about two hours of his arrival on the unit, he awakened enough from general anesthesia that he could open his eyes, lift his head, and follow commands, so we pulled out his breathing tube and let him breathe on his own. A little morphine for pain, a few ice chips for his dry throat, and he was happy as a clam in sauce.
He was also convinced that I spoke exclusively German, and was courteous enough to speak exclusively German to me. I do not speak German at all, so occasionally I would rattle back at him in hospital Spanish (I cut my ICU teeth in Texas) and he would recoil, startled. He is a world traveler and historian and as he came back to his senses throughout the afternoon he and I had many wonderful conversations in English. Any time he drifted off though, he would wake up, look at me, and start speaking German again.
Man, I don’t know. I don’t even look German. I have enormous bushy brown hair, a prominent forehead, freckles, glasses, and the kind of sloppily-assembled facial features you get from slightly inbred trailer trash that grew up in the river bottom. I look like leftover tax dodger and piney-woods moonshiner and hastily concealed ancestor ethnicity back when Irish was considered ‘ethnic’. I am white as shit, but not in the classy-lookin’ European way, is what I’m saying. Four years ago, before suffering my way through braces, I had buck teeth.
I’m not exactly pretty, but fuckin hell man, I don’t have to be. I am the apocalyptic definition of ‘personality hot’. I’m the lady equivalent of that weird-lookin fucker on TV that’s sixty years old and worryingly asymmetrical in the face parts and could bang your girlfriend in the bathroom at your favorite bar after five minutes of conversation. I am also incredibly arrogant and don’t speak a word of German. It’s quite possible that he was just telling me how my face is so gnarly it’s giving him flashbacks to WWII.
We joked a little about our respective experiences with foreign languages, and he taught me a little about the ways in which Italian deviates from Spanish. I taught him to say “qapla’.” I can’t help but feel that I got the better end of that deal.
Anyway, linguistic barriers aside, by the time we had this guy settled down and feeling pretty good, I had an imperial shit-ton of charting to get done, so Mavi watched him for a bit while I had lunch and then tore into the paperwork. The surgeon came by to see how the guy was doing, and I noticed that he was wearing an honest-to-god Starfleet insignia badge on his white coat, which after my earlier Klingon language lesson seemed like a much stranger coincidence than it probably was. We ended up having a nice chat about Star Trek, after which a couple of the RTs came up and started reminiscing about Jimmy Doohan, who apparently used to come to this hospital for pulmonary fibrosis because he lived nearby. (I would consider this HIPPA material except that it’s freely available information from Wikipedia.) He was apparently funny and personable, hated being called “Scotty,” and once left AMA because he hadn’t had any alone time with his wife in a week.
The RTs apparently thought very highly of his wife, who was much younger than him but who genuinely seemed to care about him and connect with him on a personal level. “They were great people,” said the surgeon. “I was always a little intimidated by him though.” Then he started talking about how his engineering career was spurred by his love of Star Trek, and how he missed NASA because he had felt like a member of a modern-day Starfleet there. I turned into a brick of shy-terror and finished my charting in record time.
After that, we got my pt sitting up on the edge of the bed so his feet could dangle, reminding him to hug his heart-shaped splint pillow tightly to relieve tension on his chest, then popped him back into bed and tidied up the room for the next shift. He was scheduled for at least one more major exercise activity, probably an hour sitting in a recliner, before bedtime. Exercise is critical to the early recovery phase; a pt who lies in bed the whole time will have nasty consequences. Lungs collapse and close up and fill with fluid; chest tubes clot off, and fluid builds up around the heart; blood clots up in the legs and causes pain and swelling, with a huge risk of pulmonary embolism; and the whole body misses the opportunity to tune itself up after the surgery, leading to increased swelling, decreased cardiac output, and severe constipation.
Tomorrow he’ll walk around the unit four times, and spend at least half the day in a chair. After that we’ll really start pushing. His case will be a smooth one, barring any major unanticipated events, and he’ll probably go home in a week or two. Before the surgery he couldn’t walk without collapsing because his heart was too starved for oxygen and too backed up from his scarred-up valve; when he gets home, lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise, he’ll be able to stroll around the park and even do some gentle gardening.
Other things that happened today…
The screaming lady died. Her ammonia poisoning—hepatic encephalopathy—became so intense that she could no longer speak or make eye contact, and she laid in bed thrashing and groaning in horrible garbled sentences of fragmented non-words as if demons had crawled into her skull and were eating everything inside it. Her family stopped going into the room at all, and huddled outside in knots of two and three, weeping. Palliative care approached gingerly, having been rebuffed many times before, and her closest relative made the decision without even having to be asked.
“Let her go,” he said. “She’s not even really alive anymore.”
We took the fem-stop pressure dressing off her leg, and she bled out and died within five minutes. The absence of her screams was sickening for the first half-hour; then hospital silence seeped into the cracks, a weird relief.
In the car on the way home from a shift, you forget to turn on the radio, you forget that you were going to make that phone call—you soak in the lack of alarms, the lack of dinging and beeping and chiming and clanging. It’s like breathing after you resurface from the water, at first. Your eardrums feel like somebody is pressing on them, blunting out the constant bells you know must still be ringing. Then, as other small daily sounds creep in at the edges, you forget what it was that you were supposed to be hearing. The white hum of road noise, the whoosh and rumble, disappears beneath the sounds of the car passing you in the other lane, the click of your blinker, the subvocalization of the gearshift, the creak of your knee as you depress the clutch and wonder why the fuck you can’t just give up your dignity and buy an automatic for the commute. You remember that you downloaded the new episode of that podcast, and hook your phone up with one hand, and dig that last Kit-Kat bar out of your purse to devour while you drive. By the time you reach your home, the endless litany of alarms is not only missing but forgotten.
That’s how it was with her screaming. An hour after she died, we were all cursing under our breath about the one guy whose monitor kept false-alarming. I almost forgot she had been alive just that afternoon.
We also got in two pediatric cases. Okay, teenagers. One was in a car wreck and had mashed up his legs, but was expected to recover, although his entire family was shaken and white-faced. The other was involved in a drowning incident; his mother had seen him go underwater and not come up, and although there was a nurse nearby who started CPR as soon as they could pull him up, he had inhaled a fuck-ton of lake water. His mother was a complete wreck, and understandably so, but very optimistic and desperately hopeful that he would wake up soon.
We’ve had a few drowning cases. Everyone is keeping a politely neutral face, and of course we’re doing everything we can, but (because I’m writing this a few days later) I can tell you that on Friday he had his first code blue as his lungs succumbed to the inevitable damage of lake aspiration, and that today he’s in a rotoprone bed, seizing.
He might yet make it. Maybe. It’s a long shot. Either way, I’ll be here every day through Wednesday, so if he dies I have about a 50% chance of being here for it.
Week 5 How Many Fucking Shifts Jesus
I didn't write the day of this shift because I was too busy sobbing like an open drain at a Sufjan Stevens concert that night, and then afterward my friend dragged me to her house and forced me to watch (okay, fall asleep trying to watch) Tinkerbelle and the Legend of the Neverbeast. (She has a two-and-a-half-year-old and might be going a little crazy.)
Opened the shift with a decent duo: a GI bleeder and a post-laminectomy. The latter was only under my care for a few hours, as her biggest issue was pain-- a lot of pain-- and she had come to the ICU because all the pain meds made her loopy on the medical floor and they wanted to watch her a little closer. We were concerned by how dramatically her neuro status had declined; she wasn't somnolent or respiratory-depressed at all, as you'd expect with someone having an opioid OD, but she was totally hallucinating and paranoid. We don't like to see major mental status changes in a pt who's fresh off a major back surgery and/or had an epidural (as is common with back surgeries), because there's always the chance of infection in the central nervous system.
She cleared up around 0845 and seemed totally fine. I interviewed her a little more closely about what she thought had happened, and she said: "Oh, I just have these episodes. Never really thought they were a big deal." Straight from there to a head CT, where the radiologist noted what could be a lesion-- possibly a tumor-- in her head. From that point the neuro team got involved, and because she wasn't really critical care status they moved her off the ICU.
That interview process, by the way, is one of the more ticklish and annoying aspects of nursing, but one of the most important if you want to catch things before they go south. Most people are hesitant to offer their own opinions about their medical issues to healthcare staff, which means that sometimes valuable bits of information get withheld because the patient doesn't want to look dumb in front of the doctor. Thing is, we aren't mind-readers, we rarely have a truly comprehensive health history, and we don't always connect the dots with the same one-on-one scrutiny that a person can perform on themselves. We might not be able to take a pt's diagnosis at face value, because we can't expect them to have a full medical education (I mean, shit, I can't diagnose anybody either), but we can definitely get a lot of crucial information from a person's opinions about their body.
It's like: you might not know exactly what's wrong, but by god, you know something's wrong. And we don't always know even that much, until your vital signs start to crash.
There's a saying that, when a pt tells you they're dying, you fucking listen. People don't just toss that phrasing around. They might not be able to tell you exactly why they're dying, but they know their body is about to lose its grip.
That kinda came into play later in the shift. More on that later though.
My other pt, the GI bleeder, was a bit of a weird dude. He'd gone AMA the week before and returned vomiting blood, and in addition to a massive variceal banding, he also needed a TIPS procedure.
If you need a refresher on liver failure and what it does to your guts, here's my patho lesson from last week.
So this guy, a chronic heavy drinker who regularly mixes Tylenol PM with his vodka (do not fucking do this, alcohol + tylenol/paracetamol = liver-ripping molecular knives), has a liver so blocked that all his esophageal vessels are bubbling up like a teenager's face. All the blood vessels around his liver and intestines are completely blown out and ready to explode. Medical treatment hasn't helped him at all, and eventually we'll run out of chances to catch his bleeds... so the next step is a TIPS.
A transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt, TIPS, is a tube that connects the blood vessels on either side of the liver. Now the intestines can dump straight into the system, bypassing most of the liver. If you're guessing that this can have amazingly nasty side effects, you are absolutely correct-- jizz proteins and brain-pickling nitrogens and straight-up chunks of shit are free to wander. Your liver is still getting a little filtration done, and making what proteins it can, but if it's almost completely cardboarded sometimes blood doesn't even bother and just travels by shunt... which cuts off blood flow to the liver and can kill you. But hey, you won't bleed to death?
As is common with families that involve alcoholism, this guy's family-- him and his wife, his children being estranged-- was extremely enabling and secret-keeping and just weird, with bad ideas about boundaries. He and his wife insisted that his hospital bed be moved closer to the wall sofa, so that he and his wife could hold hands as he slept; his wife refused to leave the room at any time, and spent weird amounts of time in the room "changing" (ie naked for some reason????) so that any entry to the room had to be preceded by lots of knocking and calling out. Super codependent, super enmeshed, super inappropriate, and super terrified of "being caught." When I stumbled across the pt's wall charger plugged in by the sink, a totally normal thing that everyone does, the wife reacted as if I'd caught her slipping her husband booze. Families afflicted with alcoholism run on secret-keeping, and most family members have a hard time telling what's an actual secret and what's normal, because they're so used to keeping the world at bay. I felt really, really bad for them both, because things will never get better for them without help, and they'll never get help because they're so invested in the secret and so locked into the psychological addiction of enabling.
But he went down for this TIPS at two, and did pretty well, so he's got maybe another year or two's worth of chances to break the secret and get their lives back.
While all this was going on, Rachel went home. She isn't even going to rehab-- she's been totally off vent for a while, even taking a few steps at a time, and she went home in a medicab to her children and her own home. I hope things go well for her.
The exploding poop guy was doing much better. A few days of nonstop diarrhea had loosened his belly up to the point that, when I poked my head in, I could see the droopy skin of his abdomen flopping as his nurse turned him to wipe his ass.
A couple of people asked me how somebody can live without shitting for six months. (Hopefully tomorrow I can get caught up on replies?) The answer is: you can't live without shitting for six months. You can, however, be massively chronically constipated, and if it starts slowly and doesn't advance too quickly, your body gradually learns to compensate for the increasing blockage. You shit liquid around the blockage, mostly. But eventually even that deteriorates, and soon you're backed up to your neck. Literally. So this guy hadn't pooped in something like a week, but he'd been working on that week of constipation for so long that it damn near killed him.
The last pt I got for the day was an utter clusterfuck. She was an older woman, a marathon runner, who had developed a hiatal hernia and had it repaired via Nissen fundoplication (wrapping the stomach around the esophagus, which I can't describe any better than Wikipedia). Her wife is an RN and had been staying with her since the surgery a couple of days before, and yesterday had started expressing some concerns about the pt's status: requiring more oxygen, having increased pain, unable to advance her diet, and just "looking weird." Overnight the pt's oxygen needs had increased to the point that, when I finally got report, she had been on a non-rebreather mask at 15 liters, satting 89% O2 (you and I probably sit between 96% and 100%), for almost six hours without anybody insisting there was a problem.
Sometimes nurses make the worst pts. This nurse, however, impressed the hell out of me both with her insight and her grace in light of the medical floor staff's failure to recognize her wife's decompensation... though honestly I would have been a lot pushier than she was. I can't nitpick. She's trauma-ortho and I'm ICU and therefore she's a steady time-managing proceduralist while I'm a neurotic compulsive paranoid with control issues.
The transfer was awful. Charge told me I'd be getting a pt shortly, so I asked my break buddy to watch my TIPS guy while I took a fifteen-minute nap, and notified the charge and the unit secretary to call me on break if report came up. Instead, I enjoyed a nice snooze, checked on my TIPS, poured myself a cup of coffee, and walked down the hallway to find the new pt waiting for me-- no RN, no report, just a confused transport guy from CT and a pt who looked like she was about to crash on me.
As we moved her into the new bed, she grabbed my arm and gasped: "I think I'm dying." Then she was too short of breath to say anything else. I keep my hair back in a sloppy french braid, but I'm pretty sure half of it popped out and stuck up straight in the air. Remember what I said earlier? That's not a good thing to hear from any pt.
She had subcutaneous emphysema with crepitus-- crackling bubbles under her skin-- from her shoulders up to her temples. A quick chest x-ray showed that she had a massive pleural effusion, so I got her sitting up on the side of the bed, and the pulmonologist stuck a needle in her back and pulled out a liter of bloody-clear fluid, which improved her breathing but was extremely alarming. Her wife watched the whole procedure and looked increasingly apprehensive, especially when the pulm ordered the fluid checked for amylase-- one of the enzymes secreted by the pancreas, which belongs in the intestines breaking down your food, not in your lung cavities.
Sure enough, the radiologist showed up twenty minutes later to tell us that her CT showed a giant rip in her esophagus, with communicating fluid and free air between abdomen, thorax, and mediastinum. This is SUPER BAD AND HORRIBLE and requires immediate surgery. Unfortunately, our cardiothoracic surgeon that day had started an open heart an hour before and wouldn't be available to operate for at least another four hours, and the nightmare in her gut was massive enough that she would need a GI surgeon and a thoracic surgeon to perform the surgery. We intubated her immediately to stabilize her, then transferred her to another hospital in the area, a thirty-minute drive at the end of which the op team was already preparing the OR. I hope she's okay, for her wife's sake. I can't imagine being a nurse, knowing what I know, and watching helplessly as my spouse suffered horrible pain and life-threatening health events. I don't know how she wasn't flipping tables and kicking doctors all night, watching her wife go from nasal cannula to mask to non-rebreather without being assessed for critical care status needs, watching her face blow up with subcutaneous air without somebody at least asking for a chest x-ray to rule out pneumothorax.
This is why nurses make terrible pts. We get all freaked out and controlling about our care. It's just ridiculous. Any time my husband spends in the hospital is time I will spend gnawing my tongue off in the middle so I don't get thrown off the campus.
Let me tell you, though, getting that pt with no report and no prior warning was more of a wake-up than any amount of freshly-poured coffee that I promptly forgot about and left on the station until it got cold and the unit secretary threw it away. A pt with no report AND massive sub-q (uh, that's subcutaneous in nurse jargon) emphysema will give your sphincters a workout. I had to stay a little late just to write up the incident report. Still a little stressed out just thinking about it.
I only worked eight hours though, and after that I went home and washed up and put on something way too shabby and sloppy to wear to a concert, but I guess it didn't matter because I had a blast. Or possibly an emotional breakdown. It's kind of hard to tell. I will write about today's shift tomorrow, after the morning's meeting with my sister's social worker.
My sister, btw, is doing really well, but she reminds myself a lot of me at that age-- questionable personal hygiene, terrible time management, serious lack of some basic social niceties. The usual rural-religious homeschooled stuff. But she's just as smart and articulate as I remember, and has charmed my friends and responded well to all our conversations about my expectations for her time in my home, and I'm really glad to have her with me as she starts her adult life.
Opened the shift with a decent duo: a GI bleeder and a post-laminectomy. The latter was only under my care for a few hours, as her biggest issue was pain-- a lot of pain-- and she had come to the ICU because all the pain meds made her loopy on the medical floor and they wanted to watch her a little closer. We were concerned by how dramatically her neuro status had declined; she wasn't somnolent or respiratory-depressed at all, as you'd expect with someone having an opioid OD, but she was totally hallucinating and paranoid. We don't like to see major mental status changes in a pt who's fresh off a major back surgery and/or had an epidural (as is common with back surgeries), because there's always the chance of infection in the central nervous system.
She cleared up around 0845 and seemed totally fine. I interviewed her a little more closely about what she thought had happened, and she said: "Oh, I just have these episodes. Never really thought they were a big deal." Straight from there to a head CT, where the radiologist noted what could be a lesion-- possibly a tumor-- in her head. From that point the neuro team got involved, and because she wasn't really critical care status they moved her off the ICU.
That interview process, by the way, is one of the more ticklish and annoying aspects of nursing, but one of the most important if you want to catch things before they go south. Most people are hesitant to offer their own opinions about their medical issues to healthcare staff, which means that sometimes valuable bits of information get withheld because the patient doesn't want to look dumb in front of the doctor. Thing is, we aren't mind-readers, we rarely have a truly comprehensive health history, and we don't always connect the dots with the same one-on-one scrutiny that a person can perform on themselves. We might not be able to take a pt's diagnosis at face value, because we can't expect them to have a full medical education (I mean, shit, I can't diagnose anybody either), but we can definitely get a lot of crucial information from a person's opinions about their body.
It's like: you might not know exactly what's wrong, but by god, you know something's wrong. And we don't always know even that much, until your vital signs start to crash.
There's a saying that, when a pt tells you they're dying, you fucking listen. People don't just toss that phrasing around. They might not be able to tell you exactly why they're dying, but they know their body is about to lose its grip.
That kinda came into play later in the shift. More on that later though.
My other pt, the GI bleeder, was a bit of a weird dude. He'd gone AMA the week before and returned vomiting blood, and in addition to a massive variceal banding, he also needed a TIPS procedure.
If you need a refresher on liver failure and what it does to your guts, here's my patho lesson from last week.
So this guy, a chronic heavy drinker who regularly mixes Tylenol PM with his vodka (do not fucking do this, alcohol + tylenol/paracetamol = liver-ripping molecular knives), has a liver so blocked that all his esophageal vessels are bubbling up like a teenager's face. All the blood vessels around his liver and intestines are completely blown out and ready to explode. Medical treatment hasn't helped him at all, and eventually we'll run out of chances to catch his bleeds... so the next step is a TIPS.
A transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt, TIPS, is a tube that connects the blood vessels on either side of the liver. Now the intestines can dump straight into the system, bypassing most of the liver. If you're guessing that this can have amazingly nasty side effects, you are absolutely correct-- jizz proteins and brain-pickling nitrogens and straight-up chunks of shit are free to wander. Your liver is still getting a little filtration done, and making what proteins it can, but if it's almost completely cardboarded sometimes blood doesn't even bother and just travels by shunt... which cuts off blood flow to the liver and can kill you. But hey, you won't bleed to death?
As is common with families that involve alcoholism, this guy's family-- him and his wife, his children being estranged-- was extremely enabling and secret-keeping and just weird, with bad ideas about boundaries. He and his wife insisted that his hospital bed be moved closer to the wall sofa, so that he and his wife could hold hands as he slept; his wife refused to leave the room at any time, and spent weird amounts of time in the room "changing" (ie naked for some reason????) so that any entry to the room had to be preceded by lots of knocking and calling out. Super codependent, super enmeshed, super inappropriate, and super terrified of "being caught." When I stumbled across the pt's wall charger plugged in by the sink, a totally normal thing that everyone does, the wife reacted as if I'd caught her slipping her husband booze. Families afflicted with alcoholism run on secret-keeping, and most family members have a hard time telling what's an actual secret and what's normal, because they're so used to keeping the world at bay. I felt really, really bad for them both, because things will never get better for them without help, and they'll never get help because they're so invested in the secret and so locked into the psychological addiction of enabling.
But he went down for this TIPS at two, and did pretty well, so he's got maybe another year or two's worth of chances to break the secret and get their lives back.
While all this was going on, Rachel went home. She isn't even going to rehab-- she's been totally off vent for a while, even taking a few steps at a time, and she went home in a medicab to her children and her own home. I hope things go well for her.
The exploding poop guy was doing much better. A few days of nonstop diarrhea had loosened his belly up to the point that, when I poked my head in, I could see the droopy skin of his abdomen flopping as his nurse turned him to wipe his ass.
A couple of people asked me how somebody can live without shitting for six months. (Hopefully tomorrow I can get caught up on replies?) The answer is: you can't live without shitting for six months. You can, however, be massively chronically constipated, and if it starts slowly and doesn't advance too quickly, your body gradually learns to compensate for the increasing blockage. You shit liquid around the blockage, mostly. But eventually even that deteriorates, and soon you're backed up to your neck. Literally. So this guy hadn't pooped in something like a week, but he'd been working on that week of constipation for so long that it damn near killed him.
The last pt I got for the day was an utter clusterfuck. She was an older woman, a marathon runner, who had developed a hiatal hernia and had it repaired via Nissen fundoplication (wrapping the stomach around the esophagus, which I can't describe any better than Wikipedia). Her wife is an RN and had been staying with her since the surgery a couple of days before, and yesterday had started expressing some concerns about the pt's status: requiring more oxygen, having increased pain, unable to advance her diet, and just "looking weird." Overnight the pt's oxygen needs had increased to the point that, when I finally got report, she had been on a non-rebreather mask at 15 liters, satting 89% O2 (you and I probably sit between 96% and 100%), for almost six hours without anybody insisting there was a problem.
Sometimes nurses make the worst pts. This nurse, however, impressed the hell out of me both with her insight and her grace in light of the medical floor staff's failure to recognize her wife's decompensation... though honestly I would have been a lot pushier than she was. I can't nitpick. She's trauma-ortho and I'm ICU and therefore she's a steady time-managing proceduralist while I'm a neurotic compulsive paranoid with control issues.
The transfer was awful. Charge told me I'd be getting a pt shortly, so I asked my break buddy to watch my TIPS guy while I took a fifteen-minute nap, and notified the charge and the unit secretary to call me on break if report came up. Instead, I enjoyed a nice snooze, checked on my TIPS, poured myself a cup of coffee, and walked down the hallway to find the new pt waiting for me-- no RN, no report, just a confused transport guy from CT and a pt who looked like she was about to crash on me.
As we moved her into the new bed, she grabbed my arm and gasped: "I think I'm dying." Then she was too short of breath to say anything else. I keep my hair back in a sloppy french braid, but I'm pretty sure half of it popped out and stuck up straight in the air. Remember what I said earlier? That's not a good thing to hear from any pt.
She had subcutaneous emphysema with crepitus-- crackling bubbles under her skin-- from her shoulders up to her temples. A quick chest x-ray showed that she had a massive pleural effusion, so I got her sitting up on the side of the bed, and the pulmonologist stuck a needle in her back and pulled out a liter of bloody-clear fluid, which improved her breathing but was extremely alarming. Her wife watched the whole procedure and looked increasingly apprehensive, especially when the pulm ordered the fluid checked for amylase-- one of the enzymes secreted by the pancreas, which belongs in the intestines breaking down your food, not in your lung cavities.
Sure enough, the radiologist showed up twenty minutes later to tell us that her CT showed a giant rip in her esophagus, with communicating fluid and free air between abdomen, thorax, and mediastinum. This is SUPER BAD AND HORRIBLE and requires immediate surgery. Unfortunately, our cardiothoracic surgeon that day had started an open heart an hour before and wouldn't be available to operate for at least another four hours, and the nightmare in her gut was massive enough that she would need a GI surgeon and a thoracic surgeon to perform the surgery. We intubated her immediately to stabilize her, then transferred her to another hospital in the area, a thirty-minute drive at the end of which the op team was already preparing the OR. I hope she's okay, for her wife's sake. I can't imagine being a nurse, knowing what I know, and watching helplessly as my spouse suffered horrible pain and life-threatening health events. I don't know how she wasn't flipping tables and kicking doctors all night, watching her wife go from nasal cannula to mask to non-rebreather without being assessed for critical care status needs, watching her face blow up with subcutaneous air without somebody at least asking for a chest x-ray to rule out pneumothorax.
This is why nurses make terrible pts. We get all freaked out and controlling about our care. It's just ridiculous. Any time my husband spends in the hospital is time I will spend gnawing my tongue off in the middle so I don't get thrown off the campus.
Let me tell you, though, getting that pt with no report and no prior warning was more of a wake-up than any amount of freshly-poured coffee that I promptly forgot about and left on the station until it got cold and the unit secretary threw it away. A pt with no report AND massive sub-q (uh, that's subcutaneous in nurse jargon) emphysema will give your sphincters a workout. I had to stay a little late just to write up the incident report. Still a little stressed out just thinking about it.
I only worked eight hours though, and after that I went home and washed up and put on something way too shabby and sloppy to wear to a concert, but I guess it didn't matter because I had a blast. Or possibly an emotional breakdown. It's kind of hard to tell. I will write about today's shift tomorrow, after the morning's meeting with my sister's social worker.
My sister, btw, is doing really well, but she reminds myself a lot of me at that age-- questionable personal hygiene, terrible time management, serious lack of some basic social niceties. The usual rural-religious homeschooled stuff. But she's just as smart and articulate as I remember, and has charmed my friends and responded well to all our conversations about my expectations for her time in my home, and I'm really glad to have her with me as she starts her adult life.
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