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Discussion

Collapsing Colleagues?

Did anyone ever experience a colleague collapsing or getting very ill on your unit and that your colleague became the patient?

It happened to me last year, I had graduated 8 months before...

I work in a long-term-care facility and our unit mainly focuses on palliative care and patients in a persistent vegetative state but we also have some rehab patients. There are doctors on call but for (rare) critical situations we need to call an ambulance because we don't have the equipment that's available in a hospital. That means that in a serious situation it depends on us until the ambulance arrives.

It happened at the beginning of my shift around 8 a.m. after taking care of my first patient I send him ahead to the unit livingroom for breakfast while I cleaned up because he had an early appointment in the hospital. Suddenly I hear him call out to me and just by the way he called out I knew it was really serious. I had a young girl shadowing me that was going to do flex work on our unit over the summer. I rushed into the livingroom where he pointed at my collegue who was laying on the floor.

I pushed the emergency button and I fell down on my knees to assess her. At first I thought she was having a seizure because she was all cramped up and gasping but within seconds she became extremely pale then blue and then a deep shade of purple. I tried to find a pulse which was absent and then she stopped breathing all together and I knew she was in cardiogenic shock. I send my flexworker to find my other colleagues and I started CPR and in the next moment I was on my own.

I can't possibly tell you what I was thinking at the moment I only remember my own heart racing and realizing that she was going to slip away from under me. I was convinced she was dying right then and there. In the next minute my fellow nurses rushed in and while one of them immediately started to help me with the CPR the other one started calling the ambulance, a doctor and several other people.

It seemed to last an eternity before two other nurses who were called in to assist us took over. I had no clue how long it took but I was exhausted and I stood back and watched. The next moment two ambulances were there (protocol in my country for cardiac arrest) and the paramedics put her on an IV and on a monitor, she was in VF and they started to shock her with the defib paddles six or seven times. The paramedics tried to intubate here but weren't able to because of the spasms in her airway and they continued bagging her. After another 20/30 minutes they finally had a rhytm and they took her to the hospital.

In the next hour I was trying to grasp what had happened, praying for her to live because she was only 49 years old. Until we finally heard that she made it and that she was groggy but talking and recognizing my colleague that went with her to the hospital and that the first prognosis was very good.

She's back at work now :)

I have always known that it was very probable that I would have to perform CPR on a patient sooner or later. But to have the life of someone you know very well in your hands is definately another story. It's been with me for quite some time, especially the image of her seizing and turning blue. Did any of you have an experience like this?

Featured Replies

All I can say is- WOW! Good for you and your colleges. You knew just what to do. She is a lucky lady. Lucky that it happened at work, that there was a resident to call for help and that you all were there. Keep up the good work.

Nothing like that has happened to me. A college had a very similar experience. Was in a pts room. The patient was the one that alerted my friend and her colleges. They were in a hospital, so called a "Code Blue" on their nurse buddy.

Scary, but cool stories.

~jen

WOW! Great job!

I havn't had it happen to a collegue but while I was in school and on the floor of a rehab hospital one of the CNA's has a massive seizure, we had to call a code blue and the hosp did not have an Er so the paramedics had to be called. This happened in level 3 mid way through school.It was scary.

Great job! In her time of need, you were there for her. That story gave me chills.

i was working with a nurse one noc, who was electrocuted.

can't go into detail, but she survived.

she's just not working, as a nurse or anything else.

major disabilities.

leslie

  • Author
All I can say is- WOW! Good for you and your colleges. You knew just what to do. She is a lucky lady. Lucky that it happened at work, that there was a resident to call for help and that you all were there.

I know, I KNOW. I, and so are my other two colleague's, am still in awe about how everything fit together like it was meant to be, some kind of devine intervention...

What I didn't know was that earlier my colleague had almost wanted to send her home because she wasn't feeling well, but didn't for no obvious reason. If we had send her home she would have been alone.

It had a huge impact on me personally and professionally. I was terrified the first few days to go to the hospital to see her just because of the awful images I still had in my head and because I kept playing the movie over and over in my head asking myself if I should have done better (she ended up with three cracked ribs for instance). My managers and my team have supported me tremendously and took me to the hospital to see her, that helped me a lot to take away those nasty pictures in my head. Also the paramedics who were there came back several times to tell us she was still around because of how we handled things, they kept telling us how rare it is for someone to survive all of this outside a hospital...they were great! I love those guys :)

KUDOS to you!! WOW what a story to tell your grandkids!!

You and your fellow workers did a great job. You really did save her life. Once we got a panicked call from a patient because a fellow employee had collasped across her bed. If she had been in the room with someone who was unresponsive or suffering from dementia most likely she would not have made it either.

Well done, Fillene! You did a fine job.

Last week, a PSW told me she didn't feel well, and then vomited in the nurse's station, just as we were getting our residents into the dining room.

Thank God, she was able to tell me about the "shoulder pain" she was having... putting that with the fact that she was getting greyer by the moment, we called 911 and got her to the hospital.

Turns out she needed a stent, and was airlifted to a big city hospital, where she had several more mild heart attacks.

Women tend to have non-typical MI symptoms.

Karen

LadyLurker

  • Expert

We had a new RN on our night shift once - nice guy....it was XMas Eve about 3:30 in the morning. It was really slow and we were all just standing around chatting...all of a sudden he arches back into a grand mal sz. Well - he stopped breathing, got tubed, sedated, paralyzed, had tubes put everywhere and was admitted to the ICU to r/o meningitis.

Turns out when they let him wake up the next day that he had a sz disorder and the changing shifts just made him a little sub-therapeutic. We all laughed over this one but he was probably lucky!

We once had a nurse arrest on the 11-7 shift.I responded to the code and we worked on her for over an hour.She survived and was able to return to work.She had a known heart problem.The scary part was that she collapsed and finally another nurse heard her moaning and called the code.

I was really proud of the team that responded to her code-the family sent a letter to the newspaper to thank us.

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