"Bad" rooms on a floor

Long Term Care Columnist / Guide · Dec 3, 2003

Yep.......ours is Room 223. We've had perfectly stable patients come in to that room and go out feet first. The only time I've gotten hurt wrestling with a combative patient was in that room, where I'd admitted a sweet little elderly gentleman who suddenly turned into a fighting tiger requiring eight staff members to subdue him. Patients with blood sugars in the normal range for days have been found unresponsive with sugars in the 20s. And there have been patients who came in with pneumonia and ended up with mysterious GI bleeds......once I had an elderly male patient in there who was sitting in a geri-chair eating his dinner with apparent enjoyment, and when I came back to check on him ten minutes later, he was slumped over, semi-conscious, in a literal pool of blood that was running onto the floor from the chair. :eek:

Naturally, we hate to admit patients to that room, but since it's close to the nurses' station we usually have to put our confused patients and post-ops in there, which probably explains why we seem to have so many codes and other near-disasters. Still, we are a bit superstitious about it, and more than a few of us have encountered a sense of restless energy in the room when it's empty. Weird.

BarbPick · Dec 3, 2003

My house was built in 1926. Happiness and joy as well as sorrow and death. It was built by my husband's grand father, handed down to his father and 22 years ago to my Husband. The happiness and joy as well as sorrow and death continued, we call this place home.

People are born, they live and they die. Same goes on in hospitals.

petiteflower · Dec 3, 2003

At the last hospital I worked in there was a room that I absolutely hated to go into. And whenever we had a patient in there, weird things happened. I even hated going into that room in the broad daylight when no one was even in there. I can't even explain how that room felt to me. I luckily worked with a nurse who understood how I felt and would take the patient in that room if she could. I made them all promise if I was admitted to ICU that they wouldn't put me in that room because I was convinced that I would die if I was put in there. So yes, I think there are bad rooms.

nurseygrrl, LPN · Dec 4, 2003

301...Pts in that room always go sour...fast...strange.

allnurses Guide · Dec 4, 2003

Originally posted by BarbPick
My house was built in 1926. Happiness and joy as well as sorrow and death. It was built by my husband's grand father, handed down to his father and 22 years ago to my Husband. The happiness and joy as well as sorrow and death continued, we call this place home.

People are born, they live and they die. Same goes on in hospitals.

I like your style:)

The home we live in is my husband's grandparent's which was built in the 1920's. His grandfather died in bed of a heart attack and we sleep in the same room. His great Aunt died in this room where I sit at the computer . . she died of "old age" in a great big feather bed.

As you say, people are born, they live and they die. We make more of things than we need to.

steph

Long Term Care Columnist / Guide · Dec 4, 2003

What did I tell you guys about Room 223?! This very afternoon, the patient occupying that room, who had already been discharged before I even came on---all that was left to do was take out her IV and escort her to the car---started "feeling funny". The aide who took her to the bathroom said she'd suddenly felt weak and dizzy, and by the way, I should check the BM she'd just had since it looked like the black, tarry one she'd had earlier.

HELLO?! Nothing had been said about black tarry stools at report, but when I looked, I knew before I even did a Hemoccult that we had a major GI bleed in progress. I called the MD, who said to cancel the discharge and get some STAT blood work. Hemoglobin was 7.4, crit somewhere around 20, and dropping fast (the H&H she'd had that morning was 11.2 and 33)! :eek: So I phoned the doc again, who came in right afterward and ordered a type & cross for 4 units packed cells, as well as a GI consult. I was running around like crazy, getting all the consent forms signed and doing the prep stuff for an 8PM EGD, when all of a sudden the aide came out of the room and said, "You're not gonna like this, but she just threw up some blood".

"Some blood" was hardly the word for it. I've never seen anything quite like it in real life........it was just like something out of "ER", about 200cc of bright red blood with large sausage-shaped clots. :eek: That was about the time the patient started to look really shocky, and I had another nurse stay with her while I got hold of the MD. Luckily, he was still in the dictating office, and I just barged in and announced the latest turn of events. We got her transferred to the ICU within minutes, and the last I heard she was just out of surgery, holding her own and getting her third unit of PRBCs.

Now, I don't know if it was that room or not, but nothing good ever seems to happen in there, and a lot of bad stuff does. However, things did go really smoothly when the patient was crashing, which is unusual in itself. I mean, I hate to think what would have happened if the CNA hadn't told me about the stool, or if I hadn't pushed the issue after the family had said the doctor had been told earlier and he still wrote orders for discharge. The family was already upset by what they felt had been a lack of good nursing care throughout her stay, and they were prepared to dislike me too.......but did I get the biggest hugs from them after we got Mom to the ICU! After all, they could have taken her home, only to watch her bleed out right before their eyes; in surgery (they told me just before I left) the gastroenterologist found, literally, a pool of blood in her belly.

So, even though the curse of Room 223 did rear its ugly head, at least we were able to rescue one victim from its clutches!

PMHNP10 · Dec 4, 2003

As of late, this would have to be 412 because for some strange coincidence the occupants have been borderline patients. Not that anything bad has happened, but it seem to be a home to them--1 after another, after another.

kevro1013 · Dec 4, 2003

In the facility where I work, NONE of the 4 units have a room 13. (12 then 14) However I work in the ED where in room 13 I had a spell over one month where we put in 4 ventriculostomies! (we maybe see one every other month) I can also remember most of the MI's that I have worked on being in that room, plus most of the OD's that get lavaged I can remember being in that same room ~13~.

Spooky huh...

chris_at_lucas_RN, RN · Dec 4, 2003

Those "bad" rooms ought to be exorcised.

If you believe in it, no problem. If you don't, what do you have to lose?

We had an unlucky bed on a tiny open-ward ICU I worked in, but nothing like what you are describing.

Rapheal · Dec 4, 2003

Yes, now that you have mentioned this- I can see it. We have four halls and one hall just has the worst things happen. We don't put the sickest patients there- but they always have the worst outcomes. The call-light system is always going on the fritz as well. I just hate working that hall.

adidas99 · Dec 4, 2003

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