Nursing

Nursing, wow it has definitely kept me on my feet. Lately I found out why they call my cardiac unit a step down cardiac unit, also considered a critical care floor. We get the patients who are recovering from heart surgery, had a heart attack, have coronary artery disease, and then some of the general med surg stuff. Halloween night was one really bloody night for me. I had the nicest older gentleman as a patient who had an arterial line in, or in other words a big IV put into one of the biggest blood vessels of the body. My patient was confused and often stated "Becky take me out of this basement, I want to go to my room" after reorienting him and telling him "You are already in your room, and we are on the 4th floor not a basement" he would be okay. Then he I would go in and see he would have his leg bent, a huge no no with an arterial line in the groin. I would run over and say "keep your leg straight!" He would say "why?" I would think "because I don't want you to bleed to death." and then tell him why. After about 4 times of going through this I had to get an order for a leg restraint. He was such a good sport. I just had to keep reorienting him. We get a lot of older patients who become confused or see weird things while in the hospital, like my friend calmly stated that he was seeing spiders on the wall behind me. You just have to keep telling them what's going on. We'll after a successful night with my friend, him not bleeding to death, and him pulling out only one of his own arm IV's, I felt like the night was a success. Then came the time right at shift change when he needed a procedure. It is amazing how problems just happen to occur right at shift change. On our way off the floor and going inside the elevator, part of the art line tubing became disconnected. I looked down and noticed blood was poring all over the floor. I yelled out to the staff "Get gloves!" but I knew by the time that they returned he could have lost tremendous amounts of blood. With blood all over the elevator floor and continuing to poor I did what I had to do: jumped in, kinked the tubing, stopped the bleeding, and the fixed the problem. With blood up to my wrist I saved the day. Well I thought I did. I can honestly say that was a new experience. When I took him down to the procedure a nurse stated "I hate when that happens," like it was an everyday occurrence. Boy do I have a lot to learn, first is to bring gloves when you take a patient off the unit.