Have you ever witnessed a Miracle?

Purple_Scrubs, BSN, RN · Mar 22, 2012

Not an eyewitness to it, but was on shift when a "5 foot nuthin 100 lbs soaking wet" nurse singlehandedly picked up a 300lb ex-football player who coded on the way back to his bed from the bathroom. How she got that man in the bed was beyond anyone's explanation, including hers. She had him back in bed with the board under him straddling him doing compressions by the time we got there with the code cart. We got him back, and he went home a few weeks later. Pretty miraculous if you ask me!

I have told part of this code story on here before. When the man came back to our unit (cardiac stepdown) after a stint in ICU following the code, I talked to him about the experience. He said the last thing he remembered with this little soft spoken nurse saying "Oh s***" then everything went dark!

allnurses Guide · Mar 22, 2012

I pulled up the BON website and my name was on it with a license number listed.

Sun0408, ASN, RN · Mar 22, 2012

Yes, I have.. without giving too much detail. A pt came in with a CGS of 3, huge brain bleed with a shift. EF of 15 %. Age 30's. Went for emergent crani, not expected to live, walked out of our unit a week later with no lasting effects or deficits...

We all were beside ourselves with the recovery the pt made. One week post op new EF was completed and resulted as normal :)

classicdame, MSN, EdD · Mar 22, 2012

female teenage athlete had rare brain infection. Not expected to survive. Then, not expected to walk or talk. Then, not expected to ever function in age group. Won basketball championship senior year.

nkochrn, RN · Mar 22, 2012

I wasn't actually working when this happened, but we had a lady come into our rural hospital with severe chest pain, nausea & vomiting, age mid-forties. CT scan revealed a dissecting aorta, we are 75 miles away from ANY kind of hospital with cardiac care/surgery. The nurse that called down to the other hospital to give report for the transfer said the nurse she talked to said something along the lines of, "I don't know why they're even transferring her, she's not going to make it." A very LONG surgery (i think 16 hrs) with a few scares and her family had a miracle! Every time I see her I think what a miracle she is :)

GitanoRN, BSN, MSN, RN · Mar 22, 2012

as a matter of fact my family witness a miracle when i came out of a 3mo. coma, after my motorcycle accident when i was in my teens. consequently, that experience motivated me to become a nurse :cool:

rn undisclosed name · Mar 22, 2012

I don't know if this is really a miracle or not but over 5 years later it still amazes me. I was a pretty new nurse and a pt was on our telemetry unit and was hospice. We only kept him on our unit b/c his wife worked at the hospital and we did it as a favor. We watched the monitor and saw he was bradying down with longer and longer pauses. My coworker called his wife and told me to go in there and tell him that his wife was on her way back. I went in and I held his hand to tell him we called his wife and she is on her way back to the hospital. He went back into sinus rhythm with a hr in the 90s. He sustained until his wife and daughter returned. He died peacefully with them at the bedside. Beautiful!

I've had other patients where there death was imminent yet they hung on. They seemed to not want anyone in the room when they passed. Loved ones stayed in the room for hours and hours. Making sure to never leave them alone. The one time they leave to go to the cafeteria or get coffee their loved on passes. So, I guess it just depends on what the patient wants.

NicuGal, MSN, RN · Mar 22, 2012

I have seen a few in NICU...one that clearly sticks out in my mind is a little 23 weeker that had a bad course, the only thing she didnt' have was a bad brain bleed. She was in renal failure (almost 48 hours without peeing despite being on Bumex), BP in the toilet, on 2 vasopressors, overwhelming sepis, max'd out on oscillator vent settings, pulmonary bleed. We told the mom that this little one wasn't going to make it. She started to pee on hour 48 and rallied around. That little girl is 3 now and the only thing she had to have, so far, is laser surgery to correct her vision from ROP. She is followed for 2 more years by our developmental department. She will always be very small for her age, but is smart as a whip and only a little behind in her development. Every now and again we see something that makes us take a step back.

umcRN, BSN, RN · Mar 22, 2012

2 month old brought in for failure to thrive. Over the next few weeks he deteriorated: could not drink from a bottle, stopped being able to move his little body, he came in an almost normal infant and very quickly was a little wet noodle - no muscle tone at all. Ultimately he was intubated, a diagnosis was never found but docs suspected some form of severe, rapidly progressing muscular disease - had a SMA type picture but with a very fast progression. He got a trach/gtube and was sent home to where we all thought he would die very quickly. Now he is two. He has no vent, no trach and no gtube, he is learning how to walk and loves to dance with his older cousins. He never got a diagnosis.

nurseprnRN, BSN, RN · Mar 22, 2012

i worked in a cardiac surg icu for a long time and had occasion to take care of many cardiac transplant patients; this was decades ago when the average time between being accepted for a transplant and either getting one or dying was 5 weeks. yep, that's not a typo. these people were desperately, desperately ill-- blue-grey, short of breath, drowsy, massively edematous, getting the house of god furosemide formula (age + bun = lasix dose) and barely making pee...

on first postop day 1 they, like every other open heart, had their chest tubes pulled (without a bit of flinching) and got out of bed for the first time. without exception, every single one of them almost leaped out of bed and couldn't wait to hit the hallways, since it was the first time in a long time they'd been able to do anything. we always said that they didn't have pain like most open hearts because their pain sensors had all died from hypoxia. they were pink, breathing normally, alert. all of that, and seeing the foley bag filling up with urine without benefit of furosemide, a happy sight for sure.

nurseprnRN, BSN, RN · Mar 22, 2012

umcrn: did they check him for botulism? somebody might have given him a little honey, which, of course, has botulism spores in it. after age 12 months or so, not a problem, but permeable gut before that means honey is a no-no. saw one of those once.