butterphlyrn

I had just gotten a patient extubated and gave him his call light so he could call me if he needed me. I left the room he put his light on. I went in and asked him what it was that he needed and he said... Yeah who won the football game last night. I told him I didn't know and put ESPN on his TV. A few minutes later he called again. I went in He said they just had the scores on the tv and he missed it he asked again if I new.... The other one I loved is when I handed a patient the call light and told them to call me if they needed anything. I left the room and the light went on.. I went in to see what they wanted and their reply was "Just checking"

My biggest pet peeve is not having gtt's to replace the ones that I have up and running. I work in an ICU and I just hate when I come on my shift and I have a dry levo gtt, epi gtt, ect.... and I have no replacement and my patient's vital signs are dependant on them. Everything else I can deal with myself.... I just hate not having replacement gtt and having to take the time to hound pharmacy for them or trying to get them out of our dispensing machine to mix them up.....

Monday(labor day) was the worst day I have ever seen as a nurse. In my 12 hour shift we cracked 2 chest + had another code that lasted 2+ hours. I was exausted by the end of the day but still full of adrenalin. Not a single patient listed above lived, but it still a positve learning experiance. Obviously this is not the normal day on the unit there are day when we are short staffed and just about everyone has a p__s poor attitude but I keeep going back because I love what I do and like and respect the people I do it with. I have autonomy, the doctors and other staff listen to what I think and if i am wrong tell me why. Nursing is the smartest thing Ihave ever done.

It is a shame that this seems to be a problem everywhere? the other problem that we have is that it doesn't just apply to the nursing staff, we have our nursing assistants who believe that they can spend 4 hours of their work time one the phone, and secertaries who believe that the phone is theirs and they can spend as much personal time one them that they want. the thing of it is............. with as short as my hospital is on nurses they say something to the offenders but don't enoforce it for fear of losing personal.

Wow, I thought that stuff just went on at the hospital that I worked at. Our ICU does medical and surgical. On friday we had a patient who had a CABG. He made it to our ICU bed to recover. Immediately upon getting to the roomhe went into v-tach. We shocked him, did CPR and he started pouring blood into his two pleuravacs, immediately he lost 4 liters of blood This happened at 1100. We called the surgeon who seemed put out because he hadn't eaten but he came up. We ended up cracking his chest right there in the room. Got the OR team to come up and bring the cell saver so what was pouring out of his chest we could give back to him amongst the other 30 units of blood products that needed to be given. We had blood on the rapid infuser, the internally shocked him multiple times. Finally they were about to place a IABP and we got a pressure back. The doctors yelled pack him up we are taking him to the OR. We lost his pressure again preped him for the IABP, we got a pressure back 70, sent him to the OR and he had another 5 hours to repair the tear in his aorta. The Surgeon later said thank goodness it happened when it did because if it happened in the middle of the night he would have been dead before you could have talked any of us into coming in. All they ever say is that the patient is coagulopathic give FFP. Well to our surprise the patient lived and the first day post op was extubated. Well guess what the second day post op, the patient went into ARDS.

My situation wasn't a patient from the or to the unit. It was placed on the floor by the intensive care doctor and had I used it I would have bolused her lung. I do however use the line that I receive from the or. I agree with you about getting patients from the or and using the line, but when they are in ICU, I wait for the film because I am not going to take that chance having a MD place a cather in the lung before

I too have noticed a gender difference in my hospital. MY husband is also a nurse and actually we work in the same unit. The female doctors we work for expected more out of woman nurses because we are suppose to be smarted then men, so they are hard on woman nurses and pretty much let the men off the hook and many issues. The male MD's treat the woman nurses as sex objects. I have rather large breast. I don't wear things to work that accentuate them but male doctors look at my breast before and during talking to me. But I do have to say on a whole I do think we get respected more in ICU than we do else where. I use to work on a step down CABG unit and a Step down ICU before going to ICU and I noticed that once I got to ICU doctors that normally won't talk to me on any leval were having personal converstations with me. HMMMMMM!!!!!!!!

I had a physican tell me once to go ahead and use a patients subclavian central line before getting a chest x-ray. I really didn't need to use the line emergently so I waited til I got the chest x-ray. I was glad that I did because once we got the x-ray results back, we were setting up for a chest tube because the catheter was in the patients lung. We couldn't tell clincally because the patient really wasn't showing sings of a colpased lung. His pulse Ox was lower than it had been. So I always practice, teach, and advise Rn's to wait on the x-ray and if a MD wants to use the line before the results are back you tell them to go right on ahead and they need to stay and monitor the patient. Then you tell them that you will write in your nursing notes that MD advised not to use central line without results on placement ect...................