Hours lately have become more and more scarce. Well, shifts that I would like to work. There are shifts open every day for those willing to work them. I worked two shifts in one day yesterday. I did a 10 hour MICU shift and a 12 hours rescue shift. I can't complain too much about the shift yesterday. It was a fairly easy shift.
With that being said, I did have a patient deteriorate on me. ***NOTE TO ALL: I will try to keep patients fairly ambigeous to protect their right and privacy.*** We took this patient from an outlying facility to one of the urban super hospitals with all the services under the sun. This patient required Neurosurgery and had a brain bleed. I should have known it was going to be "one of those transfers" because as soon as we put the patient in the ambulance, he decided he need to put his dinner he had last night on the floor and part of the wall. We all vomit from time to time. No big deal. The issue was that as we got closer and closer to the super hospital, the patient became less and less conscious and more and more obtunded. However, looking at the vital signs, one would think that everything was fine. As my friend Kelley the RN would say "...not so much...".
As we arrive to the super hospital, someone decided to call a trauma arrest/alert. Not sure why? So all the students, residents, interns, fellows, and the rest of the staff and trainees show up "asking questions". So after all the confusion of the who, what, when, where, and why was cleared up the patient was intubated and placed on the ventilator. Gotta love it when the patient decides to crump on you while in transport.
Luckily the rest of the day, all the people I came into contact with didn't require anything more than a ride from point A to point B. This job is not all cardiac arrests and trauma. If it were, I think the burn out rate would be that much higher.
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