Has anyone else "sensed" when something was wrong with a patient?

[Norepinephrine]

I just want to see if anyone's had a similar experience. For background, I used to be Catholic, then agnostic, now I'm a there's-something-for-sure-but-I-have-no-idea-what-ist.

Sorry if this is sloppily written-I accidentally exposed my thyroid meds to excessive heat last week (they were in my purse when I was out in 90 degree heat all day) and ruined them like an idiot. I pick up a replacement script today, but I am not on my A-game at the moment. I'm also working in a clerical role right now, so no patient care will be compromised because I (temporarily) am!

I'm still a in nursing school, but I'm working in a supportive role at a large city hospital. There's a patient at work who I'm actually getting quite close with, which happens periodically with me. I know getting overly emotionally invested is a great way to burn out, but I'm willing to deal with it because I think it's helping me to stay motivated overall. I'm going to refer to the patient as Patient (I'm so creative!), use they/them pronouns, and not mention what their exact medical issues are to make this as HIPAA-friendly as possible.

I couldn't stop thinking about this patient all week. That's unusual. I've had cases of patients who I got very close to where I thought of them for a day or two after work, but never for a week.

I had various moments throughout the week where I just suddenly thought there's something wrong with Patient”. I sometimes woke up in the night thinking the same thing.

I came into work today (clerical role) and found out that the patient had several negative events this week. All of those events matched up perfectly with when I thought about the patient. I swear I'm telling the truth.

For example, they had something major happen at, according to the covering clinician, around 1:30am on Thursday morning. I woke up at exactly 1:26am Thursday morning with such a strong feeling of dread and there's something wrong with Patient” that I was genuinely concerned that they had coded or even passed away. That's just one example.

I don't think this is a coincidence. But I'm weirded out. I'm normally a very concrete, lineal person. One of my parents is an engineer and I definitely inherited their thinking style! Also, I am not prone to panic attacks or anxiety, and I haven't had a problem with waking up in the night since my junior year of high school. I'm also a skeptic. So this is very, very unusual for me.

I'm open to considering all ideas, and I respect all world religions (if someone asks me to pray for them, I will for example, even if I am not of faith). I just want to know if anyone has had an experience like this one. I don't want to talk about it in real life because I know people will think I'm a few bagels short of a breakfast at best and a complete liar at worst.

[Been there,done that, ASN, RN]

If you have some sort of ability to connect with people when they are experiencing a "negative event", religion has nothing to do with it.

Empathetic connections are not related to any man- made faiths.

If you ARE an empath... nursing will be a VERY difficult role for you.

[Dogen]

I think premonition experiences are neuroscience based and agree with theories that propose that premonition occurs because the subconscious mind knows more than the conscious mind.

My first degree is in neuroscience and human memory, and theories of premonition aren't based in any mainstream science that I've ever read. Expertise, on the other hand, is a process that allows someone to intuit a solution to a novel problem based on similarities to accumulated past experience. In this case, it would be intuiting there's a problem based on a collection of subtle cues that may not individually suggest it. So, intuition is based in evidence. Premonition is pseudoscience.

Speaking of which, I was at work one time and walked into the nurse's station, looked at one of the monitors where a commitment monitor was talking to a patient and was about to say, "I think someone should head over there," but got as far as, "I think--" when the patient clocked the commitment monitor in the jaw. Not my best moment (why didn't I just head over there instead of speaking?), but it turned out okay (in that we got there before anything else happened).

[dishes, BSN, RN]

@dogen What is a commitment monitor?

[Dogen]

@dogen What is a commitment monitor?

In Oregon, if you've been brought before a judge and the state shows evidence that you continue to be a danger to yourself or others despite treatment (typically for 5-14 days), then you can be court committed for 180 days of treatment. The state then assigns you to a commitment monitor, whose job is to assess you weekly to see if the commitment can be dropped and you can be let go. Which seems like a pretty easy job to me, when not getting jacked.

[KatieMI, BSN, MSN, RN]

I do it all the time.

I went through a very different sort of medical training abroad where we were actually taught techniques to do this because right after you graduated you were often all alone in the field with a sick child, your hands, stethoscope and pretty much nothing else. So we were taught physical assessment at the level unknown in more developed countries. The sense of "wrong" comes with experience.

I usually can tell that something is amiss a few hours before patient really crashes. Sometimes I know why it is so, especially if I worked with the same patient before. Pulse is a little bit higher than it was, never had blood glucose that high at this hour, had usual pain med but less relief now, behaves not like he did before and the like. In half of the cases, I have no idea why I feel things going wrong, I just do. If it is so, I start doing vitals and full system assessment (neuro check - my way, not repeating stupid questions about fish in sea but meningeal symptoms, movement and sensation, breathing, heart and abdomen as baseline, adding things as needed) q1h and more often if I feel situation demands it. I also instruct CENA and tele tech to get me immediately if they see, hear or feel something strange, doesn't matter how insignificant it might seem. I get patient on tele if he is not on it, make sure IV access works and check CBG and SaO2 q1h whether there is an order or not. I also get into contact with RRT and speech therapy if they are on the case.

In like 7 to 8 cases out of 10 patient starts to go south within next 3 to 4 hours. During this time I usually can get through the chart and so, on the basis of all that, can make a detailed plan A, B and C.

[SubSippi]

I've had gut feelings about patients that they were going to go south on me without clear, objective clinical evidence that turned out to be true. But I don't think there's anything supernatural about that. I've never had a bad feeling at a certain time away from a particular person, only to learn later that something bad actually had happened.

Same here, I've NEVER been wrong when I get the "feeling." I don't get it every time a patient is about to crash, but two years in I've learned to tell the difference between nerves and stress, and that feeling in my gut that something is off.

Every nurse I work with in my ICU could say the same thing!

When a nurse calls a doc and says "I don't know what it is, but something isn't quite right," they come running.

[brownbook]

Please re-read the original post, question. She wakes in her bed, in her house, at 1:26 in the morning and thinks about a patient she had in clinicals. She finds out the next day that at 1:30 that same morning the patient had a major incident.

NO NO NO, as a few other posters have mentioned. No one has psychic abilities, no one can sense several days or several miles apart what is happening to another person.

Every second we are awake our brain is processing millions of images, thoughts, interactions that have happened a few minute ago to years ago. Sure once in a blue moon it is going to happen that a random firing of a neuron just happens to coincide with an actual event that happens a few hours or days later.

I have a friend, she calls me 2 - 3 times a year. Every times she calls....before I can catch myself, I say...I was thinking about you! As I tell myself....yeah....how many times a year to I think about her and she doesn't call.

[NursesRmofun, ASN, RN]

I don't wake up thinking something is wrong with a patient while I am at home, but I do have instincts that are not based on v/s or spoken complaints, etc. I think it was more being experienced, in my case...seeing a different color in a face or a slight change in personality...little clues that tell me something is off.

[canigraduate]

It happens in my family all the time. According to the rare research I've seen, it occurs a lot more often to those with Irish/Celt or Gypsy/Romany ancestors.

Some people are gifted, most are not, some are very adamant that the gift doesn't/shouldn't exist, some are biased against gifted people.

When it happens to you, I would suggest that you call and verify in case you are feeling true things. Sometimes, when you are new or unused to the gift, you confuse your own feelings with what the gift will tell you. It is important to figure out what is true if you are going to act on it.

My mama and grandma had it pretty strongly and would often call family members to ask them what was going on. It was usually bad news of some kind, although there were some instances of foreknowledge of happy events like pregnancies. (My mom and grandma could look at someone and tell they were pregnant as early as two weeks along and were right 95% of the time.)

I used to get calls ten minutes after a major life event, like a breakup. And my grandma somehow always (except once or twice) timed her calls so that I was on the toilet. It drove me crazy.

Whether you call it a gift or a premonition, it is possible, it is just unlikely, and very uncommon.

[blackribbon]

It obviously won't be a popular view on this forum but I believe in those moments as "God-things"...moments when God whispers and it is up to me whether or not to listen. I haven't had a moment where I woke up in bed...but have always has urges when I needed to call someone and have interceded when people were contemplating suicide or going to make permanently life altering decisions. I have had the patient whom have bothered me enough to do more follow up...caught a man going into alcohol induced seizures on the psych floor when everyone else was saying he was faking it...went and got the IV supplies and started to place it while everyone else was still assessing him so I could give him IV ativan as soon as the doctors gave me the orders... I don't doubt for a moment that God place me in that room when I was there ... I was really looking for his roommate to assess but situation cause me to talk to this patient three times within a half hour so I knew that this was NOT his "normal".

[dishes, BSN, RN]

There are hundreds of explanations about sensing that something is wrong, I try to keep an open but doubtful mind about how they occur.

[HouTx, BSN, MSN, EdD]

Crusty old bat here.... I'm old enough and have seen & experienced enough to know that we don't end at our skin; there is waaaay more out there than we can prove. Many of my acquaintances have also experienced weird stuff for which there is simply no logical explanation. . . e.g., mother waking from a sound sleep and 'knowing' that her child (away at college) had been involved in a car accident; night nurse compelled to pull over to the side of the road despite the fact that he was running late for work only to discover an injured motorcyclist that had crashed in a ditch at the side of the road in a way that was not visible to passing traffic. . . etc.

BUT - I also think that a lot of what we may call 'intuition' at work is actually the result of highly developed clinical expertise that is 'clicking' to pick up cues that we may not even be consciously aware of. Just because we can't articulate the exact train of thought does not mean it wasn't a cognitive process. Basically, if you've seen it a jillion times, you just KNOW when something is amiss, and your "nurse antennae" can be triggered by something as slight as a brief glance at a monitor as you're walking by.