C'mon, SHARE!! Amazing Stories in Nursing

[UM Review RN, ASN, RN]

Share your amazing stories, miraculous recoveries, and serendipitous misdiagnoses!

I'll never forget the pretty, sweet-tempered 35-year-old patient that I had whose X-ray and CT chest came back with a big spot on the upper right lung. It was a r/o lung cancer dx. She was scared, she told me. Especially for her two-year-old and her four-year-old.

I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. She was just too young to have cancer, her children too young to lose her. How awful!

She was scheduled for a bronch the next day. I fully expected the bronch to prove the dx of cancer. I anticipated grief counseling and emotional scenes for my next shift with her, and braced myself for a tough shift for both of us.

I came in for my next shift early and grabbed her chart to read the bronch results first.

And lo and behold. It wasn't cancer, it was the biggest mucous plug in history!

Amazing!

[begalli]

Gosh, there are a few.

Seventeen year old double lung transplant with a history of CF. She was on our unit for months! For the first several weeks post-op it was so tenuous. All you had to do was literally touch her and she'd drop her stats to the mid-70's. It would take her at least an hour to recover on already maximum ventilator support. Forget about suctioning or bathing. Poor thing, and boy...being the RN that had to provoke that drop in oxygenation was difficult.

She ended up with infection after infection. But with vigilant nursing care by a group of nurses who decided to "follow" her (we do primary nursing and are able to follow a patient from beginning to end of their ICU stay), she eventually moved into the transplant apartments across the street from the hospital with her mom and then finally she went home.

There were so many times when we thought she wouldn't make it, but she pulled through and is doing well today and driving around in her little red mini cooper, something that she dreamed of getting for her 18th birthday. Her private room on our unit was decorated with little model mini coopers. So cute!

Through all the depression and illness we never gave up on her which helped her not give up on herself. I think that's good.