What has been your best catch or save!

Too many to even remember!!!!!

My first save was a young woman came in c/o anxiety. She was a little tachycardic and diaphoretic. The doctor was thinking strange and or drug use initially. I got him to order a CT Angiogram. Sure enough there she was with almost a complete saddle bock pulmonary embolus. They used Streptokinase on her and she walked out of the hospital 2 weeks later. That was back when I was a young RN

I used to work at a community health center, which pretty much did primary medical care for a lot of un- or underinsured people. Wednesday mornings usually got started slow, as the docs/PAs/NPs had weekly meetings at a different site. So it was just the nurses and office staff that morning when a guy shows up with a bellyache. He was febrile, n/v...and he just didn't look right. I sent him to the ER and he ended up having a gangrenous appendix. Ick.

Have had a good number of babies go bad, and it pays to be johnny-on-the-spot with that. A couple that have gone from in-room-with-mom to doing poorly with NEC in a matter of hours, but we caught it in time and babies were ok.

I discovered my patient was having a MI on my second day in orientation as a new grad. No one else could figure out what was going on. She was sent to the unit. Go figure. She had classic "man" symptoms for a MI. A trop was drawn and sure enough bingo she did. Everyone still asks me how I figured that out. The docs thought it was indigestion.