So the other night I was called to assess an unresponsive patient on our locked psych unit. I arrived to find him to look perfectly fine and have perfect vital signs. We checked and he wasn't hypoglycemic (the most common cause of unresponsiveness calls). He didn't react in any way to a hard sternal rub. I was wracking my brain trying to think what could be causing his unresponsiveness.
I should add that this patient is well known to the rapid response team. He knows each of us by name and face and we have dealt with him many times, but this was the first time he had been found unresponsive.
I was standing at his bedside and had just paged the on call physician from my RRT cell phone when a code blue was paged overhead.
On hearing the overhead code announcement my unresponsive patient popped his eyes open and said:
"PMFB, it sounds like you have something more important to do."
I took off for the code thinking "You SOB" and I didn't mean shortness of breath.
