Whitney the Muslim

I apologize for the brevity of this post. For those of you that follow my scrawlings on Something Awful, I’ve been doing an AMA for the last twenty-four hours on the BYOB forum, which has diverted just a little of my writing powers.

I did manage to rant with embarrassing fervor about fruit that I like.

Anyway.

Sometimes the ICU runs like you expect it to: occasional periods of panic, lots of gross chores, and a slump around 1600 when you can catch up on your charting. Sometimes it gets a little crazy, and if you have a really rowdy pt with a lot of things going wrong, you can easily spend a whole shift on your feet and do all your charting after you’ve passed your pt to the next shift. And sometimes, the whole ICU loses its goddamn mind at once, and all your pts are desperately high-acuity and breaks only happen if everyone works together, and staffing calls random people on their days off and begs them to come in—not to take pts, but to serve as an extra flex nurse, just to help people get all their chores done.

When this happens, you have to be a special kind of dumbass to actually answer your phone, let alone come in extra. Unfortunately for me, I am that exact kind of dumbass. That week, I worked a lot.

Week 5 Shift 2

Day two of the pneumonectomy pt’s care. Day two, also, of the crazy Farsi family and their merciless caregiving.

I’m afraid the crazy family didn’t get as much attention as they probably could have used today. Specifically, I didn’t have time to do all the boundary-setting and therapeutic communication I would normally expend on a family that challenging. And their level of challenging increased throughout the day.

Early in the day they remembered that some nurse had told them once that their grandfather’s tube feeding should be paused whenever he’s being repositioned, to keep him from throwing up tube feeds. Research doesn’t support this, by the way; a lot of old-school nurses still prefer to pause while repositioning, but the fact is, the 10mL of fluid your pt will get while lying down and turning will have almost no impact compared to the residual that’s already sitting in his belly. And, in fact, I don’t ever pause tube feeds when I have a pt on both tube feeds and an insulin drip, as he was.

This is because an insulin drip carries on dosing the pt whether your tube feeds are running or not, and pausing the insulin drip while the tube feeds are on hold does not guarantee a proportional sugar/insulin level when you resume. And it’s very easy to hold the tube feeds and forget they’re turned off, unless you use the two-minute pause, in which case every two minutes it shrieks in your ear like a demon tunneling into your cerebellum… which, in turn, means you slap at the TF pump with your shit-smeared glove fingers until it stops beeping, and you stand a decent chance of turning it off entirely, which prevents it from reminding you if you leave it off for thirty minutes.

And if you turn off your TFs for thirty minutes while your pt gets 15 units of insulin intravenously, you will come back to a pt with a blood glucose of 12 and intractable hypoglycemic seizures. Fortunately, the first and second and third times the family stopped his tube feeds so they could reposition his legs twenty millimeters to the left and then forgot they were turned off, I checked on him before his glucose could drop too far.

This was bad enough, and I had to threaten to remove them from his room entirely for his safety. But midafternoon I returned to the room to find all his IV pumps turned off, including his amiodarone (an antiarrhythmic we were using to control his rapid atrial fibrillation), and blood backed up his central line halfway to the IV pump because there was no positive pressure to keep it from leaking.

I lost my shit. I threatened to have them removed by the police for attempted murder. I told them that if they touched his IV drips again and he died, they would all go to jail. I told them that if they stopped his tube feeds and he went into seizures and a coma, I would make them all stay in the room while he seized and likely died, and they could all know it was their fault.

I don’t often go off that way. But every one of them was an adult, every one of them had been warned numerous times, and every damn one of them has been caught red-handed fucking with something in the pt’s room in a way that could seriously hurt him.

I went out to the nurse’s station and fired them. I agreed to keep them for the rest of the day, which is saying something given the insane acuity of the pneumonectomy guy, but I made it clear that I would not accept another assignment with that family. They genuinely got my goat. I am a little bit ashamed.

When I returned to the room, forcing a neutral expression and a positive attitude, I found that they had pulled the sterile dressing off his central line and were scrubbing the site with a washcloth they had, presumably, rinsed in the sink. I felt something go phut inside my brain and I said through gritted teeth: “I need you all to leave the room for a bit while I take care of a sterile dressing change.”

And after replacing his sterile dressing, I just called the flex nurse to perform all his care. There were only three hours left in the shift, I was busy, and if I had to listen to them argue about who loved granddaddy the most while simultaneously trying to kill him, I was going to spontaneously combust.

It wasn’t like I had nothing else to do. Pneumonectomy guy, hereafter referred to as Tiberius, started out the morning looking tentative and just went south from there. By 0830 he was having increased respiratory distress, along with bronchospastic wheezes in his lung and, to my horror, hollow rushing breath sounds in the empty space where his left lung was removed. A chest xray revealed a huge air pocket in the left pleural space—his left mainstem bronchus was leaking. I explained this to him and his wife, carefully, and he made a gesture with his left hand: poof, fingers splayed. Then he grimaced and lolled out his tongue and exaggeratedly rolled up his eyes.

“Well, it’s not good,” I replied. “But we can’t tell yet whether it’s blown or just leaky. So you might not die just yet.”

He acknowledged this with a wry twist of his mouth. This is not the first time he’s been handed a really nasty diagnosis. (It wasn’t non-Hodgkins, by the way; there was no effective treatment for that in the 80s. It was Hodgkins—thus the splenectomy and sternal radiation.) 

Today was his birthday.

The cardiothoracic surgeon who had done the original pneumonectomy was on vacation. The Trekker cardiothoracic surgeon who did that heart I took the other day was covering for him. He and his PA, a tall thoughtful-looking stepladder of a man I will call Pilgrim (because, if I’m gonna be writing this for a while, I will need nicknames for some doctors), made eyebrows at the xray film while I hunted up the pulmonologist. 

We have a pretty broad spectrum of pulmonologist and intensivist personalities on this unit: a new mother who goes by a disarming nickname, Sunny*, and will show up when you page her but very strongly suggests that you not waste her time; a prickly but brilliant woman who dislikes me (largely because I couldn’t figure out the paging system for the first month I worked there and paged her 2034832098432 times by accident); a worldly and fun-loving hedonist who gets very focused on one pt at a time and doesn’t like to be interrupted, but handles the highest acuity pts with TV-ready aplomb; a crusty, snappish fellow with eternal under-eye bruises who gets the job done in record time and has razor-sharp skills but occasionally has to be sauced back into respectful discourse; a slightly scattered gentleman whose hands-on skills are often tenuous but who can spot a trend or a rare disorder with incredible accuracy and whose hunches are always bang-on; a tall genuine fellow with immaculate button-down shirts who is gracious under pressure and never sweats; a terrifyingly competent and unstoppable woman who I could pick up and throw at least five feet except that I think she’s a black belt; and the thin, energetic head of the department, who manages to make everyone feel personally listened to and privileged to be held to his high standards. 

And then there’s this guy. This pulm is tall, grave, soft-spoken, relatively new, a recovering Catholic, and… well. As he examined the film, nodding and creasing his brow, the CT guys awaited his advice with bated breath.

“I’m gonna need an old priest and a young priest,” he said at last, and swooped away to examine the pt before we realized we were gonna have to laugh at that one.

That’s his deal. He delivers sterling one-liners and then leaves. I have never seen a single joke of his fall flat and I have never seen him stick around for the payoff of any of them. He is basically my comic hero.

He spent all of thirty seconds bronching the pt, which was a relief since Tiberius’s poor sedation meant he was desperately uncomfortable the entire time and squeezed my hand until the knuckles cracked, then announced that his left mainstem stump had definitely developed a fistula and they would need to perform a thoracotomy immediately.

“Maybe we should manage it medically until he’s more stable,” suggested Pilgrim, and the pulm shook his head.

“You have two choices,” he said. “You can take him to the OR, or you can take him out behind the woodshed.” Then he swooped away. Fuck that guy. I felt awful for laughing at that as hard as I did.

So they packed him up and took him down. His trachea was already beginning to push over to the side, as his empty lung pocket collected air that couldn’t escape and crushed his remaining lung (this is called a tension pneumothorax and is Bad). I made his wife give him a kiss before he left: for luck, I said, but I wasn’t sure if he’d make it back alive, and if my husband were maybe going to die I would want to have kissed him first. Thirty minutes later, just long enough for induction, I heard the overhead pager: the prickly pulm was being summoned to the OR. The OR where Tiberius was currently anesthetized upon the table like the evening in the poem.

This boded ill. This pulm is noted for her steady-handed bedside code work and management of nightmarish near-death situations. For them to page her instead of Dr Swooper... I sat at my workstation, charting furiously, knowing I was unlikely to get another chance for the rest of the day, and performed the first intervention on the crazy family’s TFs. 

Tiberius returned to me looking like death warmed over: ice pale, pupils wide open, with a shitty hematocrit (blood level) and a blood pressure in the seventies. He had two new chest tubes, a new arterial line in his left wrist, his feeding tube pulled out, and a huge fucking incision across his left side and back that made him look like the loser in a machete fight. The incision bulged and sucked in with each breath; Dr Trekker had not had time to close it properly, and had just stapled the skin together.

What happened was this: they put him on the table, right side down, and cut him open. As Dr Trekker opened his chest, a huge clot rolled out of his left mainstem bronchus stump and fell into his right mainstem bronchus, where it completely obscured all airflow to his one remaining lung. The prickly pulm spent thirty minutes bronching it out, during which his blood oxygen levels dropped to around 30% for two minutes, then 50% for ten minutes, before recovering to the 80%s. 

The bronchopleural fistula in the left stump was not repaired. Closure and placement of chest tubes had been emergent, leaving him with whatever chest tubes they had lying around—a pair of narrow, easily kinked tubes rather than the big hard tough ones we would normally use.

The family was glad to see him back alive. His wife cried and kissed him again. He just lay there, blank-faced, a waxy parody of the guy who had managed to write “WHO FARTED” on a clipboard from under full sedation the day before. The staff in the room met each others’ eyes, not the family’s. We have all seen hypoxic brain injuries.

“It could just be leftover anesthesia,” I said to the respiratory technician in the hallway. “He wasn’t down for long. He’ll probably come up soon.”

But he still struggled. Two units of blood later, we started levophed to maintain his blood pressure, and his hands and feet started to swell as the blood vessels in them became too tight to carry fluid back out of them. His blood pressure hovered somewhere between ‘tanked’ and ‘crumped’, which are the words that all ICU nurses seem to have spontaneously and simultaneously accepted as gifts from the ether to describe a pt that is diving into the homeostatic abyss.

And not a single response to anything we did. He stared blankly at the ceiling. I wanted to throw up.

Finally we all agreed: he just wasn’t improving. Air bubbles poured through his left chest tube in a continuous stream. His right lung had diminished breath sounds, and what air was moving sloshed through his semi-collapsed air sacs like shoes in a washing machine. It was time for yet another bronch.

Dr Swooper performed this one, attempting to advance the endotracheal tube into his right mainstem bronchus so that we could apply greater PEEP without totally blowing the stump. As he suited up, I ushered family out of the room and laid the pt flat so the doc could get to his breathing tube easily.

“Tiberius,” I said, more out of habit than anything—you don’t do anything to a pt without telling them first. “We’re gonna do another bronchoscopy, like the one we did yesterday, and see if we can get your breathing tube down a little farther.”

His eyes shifted and he looked at me. Unfocused, but he looked at me.

“It won’t take long,” I added, squeezing his hand, delighted to see his response. 

He locked eyes with me, a proper focused gaze, and then rolled his eyes at me in a big sloppy expression: yeah, sure, won’t take long at all. Tiberius was back.

The bronch wasn’t super successful, but we did manage to get it angled partially into the right mainstem. No PEEP, but protection from rolling clots. After that the GI doc returned and put another feeding tube down, and I held his hand during that and dosed him with huge boluses of pain medication until he was completely gorked again.

At this point I didn’t care to keep him awake. Anybody who can muster a sense of humor like that is gonna be just fine.

I passed off report and then dropped in to check on abd guy. He is not having a good time—his pancreatitis has progressed from necrotizing to hemorrhaging, and he’s taking a lot of blood, not really responding to much. They’re considering moving to CRRT instead of dialysis. His guts are all inside, but not making any noise, and the GI surgeon took him down and washed him out and couldn’t find any obvious problems besides ‘damn, this guy looks raw in there’. Still keeping an ear out for him.

I accidentally called Crowbarrens “Crowbarrens” to my manager instead of using his real name. I got the most confused look, and had to explain that I uhhhhhh made up a name to call him so I could complain to my husband about him without violating HIPAA. I am not out to my bosses about writing shift reports. I don’t think I’m doing anything illegal or unethical—I really am changing significant details—but bosses tend to be a little paranoid about things like that.

Tomorrow I’m going to insist on having him 1:1. He’s sick enough. He’s not appropriate to pair. I want to give him a lot more attention than I can drag away from another pt, and it wouldn’t be fair to the other pt anyway.

I know he’s not likely to live. I should really not be getting this invested.

Week 2 Shift 1

By the time I clocked in yesterday morning, the fem-pop guy had been transferred to a telemetry unit in preparation to have him go home later in the day, the neurodegenerative guy had been sent home on hospice (probably won't die immediately, but will be allowed to drink water instead of begging for swabs), and the intensivist was standing at the front station talking about Rachel*, the birthday mom, and her swallow study later that day. They planned to try her out on a Passy-Muir valve, a type of tracheostomy apparatus that allows the pt to push a button so that they can speak and eat. 

I, of course, got back my HD pt, along with the new pt in the next room down, a gentleman I recognized from a previous admission. He had suffered a tremendous stroke about two months ago and lost all use of the left side of his body, along with the right side of his face for some reason. He is also now expressively aphasic, which is to say that he can understand other people's speech but can barely speak for himself. In addition, this guy-- in his sixties, with a history of med-controlled diabetes and vascular disease caused by the diabetes, which led to a coronary bypass and multiple coronary stents despite his active lifestyle and loss of forty pounds after diagnosis-- has become incontinent of stool and urine, and recently started having trouble swallowing.

Once you have diabetes, it's very hard to get rid of it. It's pretty much a downward slide through shredded veins and organs to stroke, heart attack, or renal failure, or some unholy blend of the three. Some people are genetically predisposed, like this fellow, who might have been okay if he'd caught it earlier... but he wasn't feeling the whole 'see the doctor every year' thing and thus didn't realize his sugars were rising until it was too late. 

Worse, when he had his stroke, he was in bed with his sleeping wife, and was unable to get help for several hours afterward. So he wasn't eligible for the clot-busting tPA treatment (a strep toxin that causes total breakdown of the body's clotting cascade, which is very useful when your blood is clotted somewhere inconvenient like your heart or your brain). Thus, the sequelae-- the effects of his stroke-- are pretty well set in stone.

He was in for pneumonia, which he got because his half-paralyzed throat was letting chunks of dinner slide into his lungs. After a lot of discussion, he and his family agreed to have a percutaneous gastric tube installed today, so that he could have his food pumped directly into his stomach.

A PEG tube installation is pretty simple. You need a moderately sedated pt, a tube that goes down into their stomach with a camera and flashlight, a scalpel, and a hole-stretching apparatus. A lot of people resist this, because the end result is a tube poking out of your belly through which you get Ensure, and it's kind of the final step in admitting that your swallowing function is pretty well fucked. He and his family consulted the niece and nephew, a pair of doctors on the east coast, and decided to avoid the repeated aspiration pneumonia episodes and increasing weakness that inevitably follow when you try to keep eating even after your throat goes floppy. 

Part of my job was to place an NG tube so that the docs down in Interventional Radiology could dump contrast into his stomach, which makes it easier to see the stomach on X-ray and thus to place the tube. Unfortunately, his septum was heavily deviated so his right nostril was blocked off, and as I started feeding it into his left nostril he started groaning and screaming.

It's not a comfortable procedure. I'm usually very quick about it, and I use lidocaine lube when I can so that it's not sheer misery. But it's almost impossible if your pt can't stop yelling long enough to swallow, because your tube will just end up in their windpipe. When you're hollering, your airway is open; when you're swallowing, it's closed, and your esophagus opens up instead. I used all the tricks I had and got it into his esophagus, after which he was much more comfortable... but it had coiled up in his esophagus and had to be taken out.

I called it quits, informed IR that there would be no contrast, and apologized to my pt with warm blankets and a single ice chip (which he choked on). That's two NGT fails in a row. Like any other ICU nurse, I am superstitious as shit. My next NGT placement will probably be a volunteer try on a pt who's heavily sedated or dying, so I can get the third one out of the way and/or break the streak. 

Okay, I am not actually superstitious as shit. I am way into rational thinking. After a few fails at any nursing procedure, your brain starts to overcorrect and focus on changing things, with the result that you can have a much longer streak of fails that slowly destroys your brain's instinct and your muscle memory. When you start fucking up a bunch, it's time to find somewhere you can practice where fucking up won't hurt anyone, get real relaxed, and hopefully pick an easy one to do so that when you've done it you're back on track. It's amazing how quickly your brain will jettison all your hard-earned methodologies and hand movements once they miss a couple of times, and you can blow years of experience on one bad afternoon of IV sticks if you don't follow it up with an easy stick to remind your brain that the old info is still useful.

It's just much easier to package this as a superstition.

I also educated his family a lot about stroke and aftermath. For the first six months after a major brain injury, your brain is rearranging all the furniture, trying to salvage what it can and cover for the damaged places most effectively. Some days you're really working well, and some days you're barely yourself. Sometimes your brain finds a really great place for the sofa to be and you seem to have that corner of the living room wrapped up, and then the next day your brain wonders if it could push the sofa six inches to the left and fit the end table between it and the wall, and for the rest of that day you're figuratively barking your shins. To, you know, torture the metaphor. After that first six months, your brain has a pretty good grasp on where the furniture will be from now on, and works on adjusting everything a little at a time until the decor is right and the angles are all straight.

After a year, you stop having up days and down days for the most part, and you find your baseline. From there you can decline, if you don't exercise and get good treatment, or you can work on further recovery. 

They seemed relieved to hear this. He had certainly been having up and down days, and they were all very frustrated with the way his progress seemed to appear and vanish without warning. It's cool, I told them, his brain remembers what worked, it's just trying to decide what else it needs to move to make this happen... and if it's worth having good speech if that means not having use of your left hand.

This is an incredibly simplified and anthropomorphized description of the brain's healing process, but as a metaphor it seems to help people very much. Sickness is supposed to be linear, in our minds: we get sick, we get better. Maybe we relapse, but then we get better again. To face a process that's fluid and ongoing, in which we make strides and then seem to slide backward... we don't like that. It reminds us of processes like piano practice, potty training, and grief.

And just as it helps to know that the numb days are just as normal as the days we spend in bed, that the accidents in the grocery store are just as normal as the days with dry underpants, it helps us to know that progress is not lost and that our bodies are doing what they should.

But that's just, like, my opinion, man.

My whole unit has been on a Big Lebowski kick. I saw it for the first time recently and, because I have a history in critical analysis, I felt like Donnie was a literary metaphor for Walter's feelings of weakness and incompetence, and that even though we see him bowling well as part of the team (functioning well as a human, in extended metaphor), we also see that nobody acknowledges him except for Walter, because to interact with him is to invite Walter's abuse to fall on them as well. It isn't until Walter's tough-guy persona is collapsing and Donnie is the only part left functioning that we finally see the Dude acknowledge him... just before he dies, allowing Walter to invite that part of his personality back into the whole, allowing him to be the one that experiences helplessness and grief. I told a couple guys on the unit about this and it turns out there's a fan theory that Donnie literally does not exist, which I feel is a bit excessive but sure, we live in a post-Fight-Club world. Since then word got around that I'm a huge fucking nerd and simultaneously everyone has watched Big Lebowski again just to see.

Wait until they find out how I feel about the Silmarillion.

PEG guy went down to have his tube placed and was gone for most of the afternoon. He came back just before shift change at seven. Fairly uneventful day with him.

HD lady did not have a good day while I was at home eating honey. Her bowels have been in a world of hurt, and although the rind sludge finished expressing the night after my previous shift, by the next morning she was oozing bile. You don't want free bile in your gut. They took her down for a CT scan, pumped contrast into her OG tube (like an NG tube but through the mouth, very common with pts who are intubated anyway), and watched the contrast feather out into all the corners of her belly. This is a very bad thing and she immediately went back down to OR for a washout and resection, where they discovered two things:

--Her entire abdominal cavity was full of liquid shit
--Her intestines were so stiff and swollen that they were like hot sausage casings, ready to blow at a touch.

It took them a lot of work just to find two places that could be sewn together, but they managed to put the whole mess back in, sew it up, and send her back to the ICU with a note that they would not operate on her again. Either she would somehow magically drop the swelling in her gut, or her intestines would dissolve. There's not much we can do to influence that. Her abdomen was, when I picked her up yesterday morning, almost completely open. She had two new drains in addition to the old one, with serosanguineous-- bloody and clear-- fluid pouring out through them. She was no longer moving her arms or blinking. Her body was so swollen with fluid that her skin had started to blister, and everywhere anyone had stuck her for the last few days was pouring clear-yellow fluid. 

She was so incredibly swollen that I called immediately for an order to doppler-ultrasound all her arms and legs. Of course, she was full of DVTs. FULL of them. Our hands are tied, though-- we can't give major anticoagulants to a fresh post-abd op pt. Her platelets were beginning to drop. The doc suspected disseminated intravascular coagulation (DICs), a condition in which the body is so sick and inflamed that it forgets how to clot, and platelets spontaneously form tons of tiny clots and become useless. We also tested for heparin-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia, in which the body reacts violently to anticoagulants and dumps all its platelets. She came back negative for both. Her belly stayed taut and distended.

She probably has cancer from the original pelvic mass in her bones, or somewhere else. The cancer won't kill her-- it'll be the bowel thing that does her in.

We dialyzed her and gave blood and albumin (a blood protein related to egg whites in structure, which gives blood its tacky sticky qualities and acts like an osmotic sponge to suck water back in from the tissues to the bloodstream). Her blood pressure was much more sensitive this time and I was forced to turn her levophed way the hell up, even with the albumin. Her family sat by the bed, grim-faced; her husband stared at the monitor, red-rimmed and hollow, until dialysis was finished and I sent them all home for the next two hours so we could pack up the machines and clean the room before shift change.

Her gown was soaked again from all the oozing, so I grabbed a fresh one and started stripping the old one off. Beneath it, all her drains were full of fecal material.

The incision site smelled strongly of bile and feces. I opened it up and found trickles of brown and dark green pouring from between the loose staples. I emptied the drains and they refilled instantly. The whole room stank of shit and death, the smell of inevitable defeat.

I cleaned her up as best I could, because it was the last thing I could do for her. Her blood pressure was holding for now, but I knew that within an hour the poison would spread and she'd be back on pressors. I washed her body and put gauze over the blisters, lined her gown with absorbent pads, swaddled the drains in towels to hide their contents, and paged the doctor to let him know. Then I called her family and told them to come back to the hospital, because she'd taken a nonspecific "turn for the worse" and they should be at her bedside.

By shift change time an hour later, I came out of the PEG guy's room with my polite smile still in place, sanitized my hands, muted the alarm that told me her BP was dropping, and started cranking up her levophed. She was still alive when I left the hospital, but I know for a fact that she died last night.

Meanwhile, Rachel passed her swallow evaluation and had her first sandwich in a month-- chopped bacon and avocado on rye, specially ordered from the cafeteria. Her nurse gave her a little of the birthday cupcakes, which they had saved in the freezer. I went in the room once to help her with a bedpan, and when that was finished she pressed her trach valve button and said: "Thank you." This is the first time I've ever heard her voice. She has an Eastern European accent.

Plan with her is to move to a rehab facility later this week. Her last chest tube had, at that point, been water-sealed for 48 hours, and the doctors wanted to pull it out today. Her one-year prognosis, if she avoids pneumonia, is extremely good-- the docs think she might be back to near baseline within two years.

I have the next five days off, and I'm not back at that facility until next weekend. I might not see her again. I hope she writes, later, to tell us how she is. Some pts do, some pts don't. When we get a letter we post it on the wall in the break room and read it over and over again for literally decades. I think if Rachel writes us a letter we will frame it.

The other woman with the perforated bowel is doing better today. She received a total of nine units of blood yesterday, but her bleeding has stopped and the bowel repair seems to be holding. I didn't get to see her much, but her prognosis is good, so I'll probably catch up on her case next week.

I don't know how much updating I'll have for you guys on days I'm not working. I typically work three to four twelve-hour shifts per week. I also don't know how long I'll keep this diary thing going, but I do promise that I'll give fair warning before I stop, because nothing pisses me off more than when somebody just randomly ditches their blog right after I started reading it. And thank you all for the encouraging comments-- it's really neat to know that people are reading and enjoying my torrents of unfocused rambling. You are great.

Now I'm going to have a nap.