Kharma711

This is more a vent post than anything... Had a patient today who any reasonable nurse would say should be on hospice.. trach, tube feeding, dependent on CRRT and IABP... screams in pain (silently) to any touch/turn... extremely cachetic with mutlip...

Just this past shift I had an elder lol with dementia.. at the beginning of shift she was a little agitated and I reoriented her and gave her the remote/call light and told her to call me if she needed anything... her response, "I'd rather call roto-...

Had a patient in DTs who was hallucinating very vividly all shift. All night she had been calling me Kiki and saying off the wall things... my two favorite quotes from this lady were: "Kiki you better clean this kitchen up" to which I responded ok we...

"Patients current hypervolemic state likely related to a TACO" It took 4 nurses and some help from Dr. Google to figure this one out. None of us, not even the charge nurse who had worked inpatient for 30 years, had ever heard of this acronym. I thou...

A few months ago, I come in and get report like any other shift. The final patient I get report on is one I had about a week ago so I remembered her. As the off-going RN gives me report, I'm looking at the patient and her vital signs. I've had many p...

I will preface by saying, I'm still a "new" nurse in my practice, with about 1 1/2 years experience. When I was in orientation, it took the full 3 months for me to get my required 3 successful IV starts to be allowed to place an IV independently. Fas...

Oh boy it's been a shift... First off, I was the code nurse which means I'm responsible for being present if a patient is going downhill or coding and facilitating the process. Which is something I don't mind... However, this shift I started out with...

I've seen a couple other people's patients pass on when DNR, but I just lost my first patient assigned to me and it was heartbreaking. First, it was a teenage boy... he was so young and never got to truly live his life. There was absolutely nothing I...

"Against medical advice" form... it's a way for a patient to sign out of the hospital without being discharged and the hospital is not responsible for the outcome or possible readmission.

If the patient had been a psych patient then I would have just refused to have them again. My unit is good about making sure not to burn one nurse out on a difficult patient and will rotate our nurses. Thank goodness it ended the way it did, is all I...

Thank you so much for this and all previous replies... like I said, long shift and I had to restrain myself from skipping along happily once she said she wanted to leave. At leasthe I know I'm not alone! Haha

I hear that and understand but I feel like I was lacking... I didn't know how to talk to his family and was so afraid of giving him more pain medicine and I just feel inadequate in the face of this tragedy... I don't know how to just file it away now...

2.1 in a mostly asymptomatic patient that should have passed go (stepdown) and gone to ICU... he finally decompensated an hour after he got to my unit with a map of 53 and went to ICU but I stayed over 4 hours with just this one patient and another n...

So let me start by saying this is definitely a "what I've learned" type of post combined with observations and reflection. Probably going to be long and perhaps a bit scattered since I've been awake 24 hours. I have a several shifts in a row either b...

As far as the tech part, the tech was unavailable, but rather than accept my help with repositioning, she left the patient sprawled in what looked to be a terribly uncomfortable position until the tech came back from break. It didn't hurt my feelings...

Again, I'm on very little sleep at the moment, but I always prioritize life and death over touchy-feels so to speak... but I have been pushed to the max the last couple weeks. I realize I've been vague and scattered but that is truly how I feel and i...

Perhaps I didn't put this into perspective as much as I had hoped. Again, forgive me because I've been awake too long. I get along with most everybody. In fact I make an effort to be friendly to absolutely everyone, not just my unit staff. Be it hous...

Ok so, to start with, I'm generally someone who will stay over and help if needed with no qualms and no complaints... that being said, I experienced what I feel is an extreme reaction by an oncoming nurse to a pretty small thing and he was downright ...

Sadly right now we are under temporary management aND the temporary manager is leaving in a few days... not even sure what to do or who to email... it's a mess on my unit right now...

Shifts like this happen more often than not and in my year on this unit I have learned to accept that.... but seriously the crap after shift ruined everything for me... I might have been busy and stressed but I wasn't upset in the least until all thi...

ED is in the middle of construction at my hospital and we all just received a notice from the DON which basically states: ED wait times are too long and too many patients are coming through so... 1. As soon as discharge orders are written/ a bed bec...

Ha yes a brave soul under a contract for another 13 months... though I am considering a transfer to a different unit...

The saddest part about this is that we can't get new nurses. There have been postings listed for my unit since I hired on a year ago... we have hired 5 nurses in that time. One of which quit in orientation, 2 transfers from other units, and the other...

The urinal/bedpan thing is just another aspect of what is a huge problem with this new system! The facility I work at is so broken it isn't even funny and this just takes it to a whole new level... those press ganey scores they worry so much about ar...

First off, I don't dislike my current unit as a whole, but my UD is one of those management horror stories that picks out favorites and specific people to torment. I have wanted to work ICU since before graduation and spoke to the UD about it in my ...