Let Me Tell You About My Saturday!!!

First off… This is what I woke up to this morning….

Really, Snow????

Oh well… I can deal with this… It’s pretty and the roads are clear.  Now that’s my kind of snow :).

By watching weather.com last night on my iPhone App it said we were in for rain.  When we got home last night we got pelted with sleet but still I never expected to wake up to this 🙂  Today’s high though is 57 degrees so it’ll be gone soon.  But it does make for some pretty backgrounds!

Anyway moving on 🙂

How many people do you know that would be willing to give up an entire Saturday to go sit in the ER?

Well I did… so you know of one :).

No, I wasn’t with a family member or a friend, well unless you want to count my aunt, but she’s one of the doctors.

Have I peaked your interest yet?

She had me come down and spend some time with her in the ER and talk to the nurses.  Wow I have to admit, some things I always thought aren’t true, that’s for sure.  Plus they kept calling me a “White Cloud”.  I wasn’t sure what that meant but eventually they told me.  They (as in all the nurses and the doctors) said that Saturday was a very unusual day in the ER.  Usually they are running running running from one thing to another.  Our Saturday, we had down time… we actually had down time.  Sounds like if you needed to visit the ER that would have been the day!!!

So anyway I “worked” an eleven hour shift with my aunt.  When we first got there she had me talking to Robyn.  Her first patient came in with a nose bleed and chest pain.  She looked at me and said… Go figure, he’s testing positive for Cocaine.  Bad deal!  The doctor went in and spoke with him and then he was released.  Then there were your typical cases the flu, chest pains, leg swelling, etc.  There was a cute little ol’ 95 year old man who came in that had leg swelling.

Then the trauma hit!

After a couple hours of tagging along with Robyn I got to go sit with Misty.  Now Misty, she’s flippin hilarious, but I also sometimes think in that line of work you have to have a sense of humor.  She told me how her life was and how she changed it around to suit her and her kids life the best.  Wow, she’s one impressive gal!!!  She came from a “Dope” family (as she put it).  She had 4 kids and no “baby daddies” and she decided she wanted a better life for her and her kids.  She went to school, got a nursing degree and has plans to retire at 45.  WOW!  She extremely impressed me!!!  And she was fun to talk to… she offered one guy Coke minus the crown…. LOL

But back to the trauma…  I had only been around Misty for about 15 minutes when a guy in transport from one hospital to ours Red Lined and was immediately brought into the ER.  Right before he was brought in, some of the other nurses had started talking to me as well, and then he came in.  Since I’m not even a nursing student I didn’t figure I should go into the rooms or anything but when all the nurses went running to this patient Michelle grabbed my arm and drug me into the room.  I of course stayed off to the side out of the way but I got to experience it all.  They actually got his heart ticking again and then I got to help them move him up to the ICU.

In the mean time between getting him back going and moving him to the ICU another man came over and they had to do some resuscitation on him as well.  They actually needed help so I got to hold his arm for one of the nurses and the tech’s so they could try to draw blood samples on him.  We got him back going and moved him on to the ICU as well.

I also got to get more tubes for some of the nurses, put an arm band on a patient, find some arm restraints for one patient so they’d quit moving (they were out of it and didn’t know they were moving), told some patients that the nurse would be right with them but she was detained (to which they replied ok momma made it.  The nurse and I neither one knew what that meant…) and then they were going to let me help do a Foley (catheter for female, I was just holding a leg while the nurse did the actual work…) but that didn’t end so well.  Sometimes things catch you off guard, especially when you aren’t used to them or never seen it done… yeah I wound up in with my aunt and the other doctor with my head between my legs.  I decided I should sit before I passed out.  LOL.

All the nurses then would stick their head in to check on me and of course my aunt got tickled at me… but it was all good.  Both the nurses and the doctors told me about their fainting or almost fainting stories or just the really hot feeling while your head is swimming (that was me), but by the end of the day they did a Foley on another lady and I was just fine.  The initial shock had worn off and I was fine.

My aunts shift was over at 8pm.  Unfortunately my day ended by watching them call TOD (time of death) on a woman at 7:59pm.  Later they were looking at her lab results.  She walked herself into Triage and the doctors are unsure how.  Her Creatinine (Normal levels of creatinine in the blood are approximately 0.6 to 1.2 milligrams (mg) per deciliter (dl) in adult males and 0.5 to 1.1 milligrams per deciliter in adult females.) levels were astronaumical (the doctors had never seen such high numbers) and her potassium levels (The normal potassium level is 3.5-5.0 mEq/L (mEq/L stand for milliequivalents per liter of blood and this is a measure used to evaluate the level)), one doctor said the highest he’d ever seen was an 8, this lady was a 9.7.  They have no idea how she was walking and talking.

Where I got my biggest shock (and it really wasn’t but still) was the fact if you watch Grey’s Anatomy, or ER or any of those doctor shows it seems like the doctors do all the work, yet what I saw this weekend was the nurses do it all.  My aunt told me the doctor’s job is to asses the situation and call out orders to correct it and the nurses do the work.  Very interesting!

But I got to talk to so many different nurses with so many different backgrounds.  This was one heck of an interestingly awesome Saturday!  Ok I’ll shut up now, I just never wanted to forget this so I had to share 🙂