"Funny Codes"?

[burn out]

One night we got a new admission into ICU from ER. It was a female patient being admitted with COPD in her 40's. She did not appear to be in distress and was able to talk with o2 on vital signs were all within normal limits no red flags anywhere. Her nurse got her admission assessment done without incident and pt settled in. Suddenly, we are charting at the desk, when there is a loud crashing sound in her room. We run to her room to find her face first against the wall(Like she had collide with the wall at a great rate of speed) and was slideing face first down the wall, her catheter was stretched acrossed the room (connected to the bed still) her water pitcher spilled all over the floor and her heart rate dropping in the 40's then 30's then 20's call a code. It was a disasterous (sp) code having to perform it in the floor. It took forever to get her intubated and the doctor was soaking wet when he was done with that, then he had to shock her in all that water (with paddles in his hands he said..just say I was a brave man). We were calling for our strong monitor tech to help but he had run to the "Can" and could not come out. It took us an hour to get her body up out of the floor so the family could see her (we had to bind her up like a turkey and use a backboard and hoyer lift plus 6 people to lift).

I now this was tragic but afterwards we all were talking about the code and how it went and we all started laughing. Sometimes laughter is the only way to cope with this job. Are we just sick or does anyone else have codes like this and how do you cope?

[Ruby Vee, BSN]

years ago, when working in ccu, the ccu nurses took turns carrying the code beeper for the house. my best friend's husband al (not his real name) was the medical resident on call, and i had the code beeper. at about 2330, a code was called on the rehab floor. al and i went charging off to the rehab floor carrying the lifepak. when we got there, the spectators gathered around showed us exactly where the code was.

lying on the floor in the middle of the room was a little old man lying on his back, shorts around his ankes and his legs stiffly upright in the seated position. he was rigor mortised. "no one had seen him since dinner," the charge nurse said. "his roommate said he was in the bathroom, so the nurse knocked and when he didn't answer, she said she'd come back later. she forgot. and then it took us awhile to get the door open and figure out how to get him out of there without straightening him out." al said we needed to code him anyway, even though it looked pretty futile, so we started compressions while the rt started bagging him. the rt was from the rehab floor, so maybe he didn't know that there was supposed to be oxygen hooked up to the ambu bag. when we reminded him, it turned out that the oxygen tank was empty. we ended up stringing oxygen tubing from a flowmeter in the next room. the code card was unlocked and most of the contents were missing. we had the pharmacist bring up code drugs from the pharmacy, and al stuck in a central line since the patient had no iv. (not much blood return from a central line on a dead patient!)

someone from the rehab floor pushed a gram of lidocaine -- not that it probably hurt anything by that point. and the nursing supervisor was standing in the back of the room flossing her teeth the whole time. flossing her teeth!

when it was all over, the roommate made himself a dnr -- he said he didn't want to go through all that! who could blame him!

[patricelynne]

In my senior year in training we had 3 mos. of team leading and mine was on Osler 4, a public ward with primarily indigent, physically-challenged patients from Baltimore's ghetto. The first room on the ward held 4 and was called the Rose Room The sickest, most likely to crash were in there and on monitors, the old green Emerson ventillators, w/ chest tubes bubbling away, on O2, sneaking ciggs if at all possible. Found a jar of Kosher pickles between the thighs of one on NAS. Another time an intern discovered a bottle of Four Roses in bed with a man w/ a bronchopleural fistula joining his pancreas and his left lung. Had to really watch 'em! One eve shift a classmate and I were dealing w/ a 300+ sized granny---the kind who was on "CorticodigovitamycinTB"---and she coded while giving birth to major constipation results on a bedpan. The timid little lady opposite her saw all of us attempting to "save" the first lady and it scared her so much that she coded, too! Down the hall, an elderly man said to the nursing aide: "Something is wrong with my equipment." and stroked immediately following that. (Turns out he knew something about enginering and made a metaphor.) A new admit was delivered to the floor from ER on a stretcher and was waiting outside the Rose Room for transfer to a bed. He figured out what was going on and got off the stretcher, stating "I got de trombonepleabitis but I ain't stayin' here! They'll kill me here!!" Boy did he shoot out to the elevator fast! Never dull is it boys and girls?

[bethin]

This probably isn't too funny and I feel bad for laughing. Had a pt who was being discharged after a MI. He had walked to the br by himself (wife in room). I was on the other end of the hall when the wife comes out of the room screaming that she needed someone stat. I run into the room not knowing what to expect. I don't see the pt on the floor so I go to the br. Keep in mind these bathrooms make airplaine restrooms look huge. The poor guy had collapsed and had his hand stuck down the toilet in the drain. And it was stuck good! Couldn't do compressions as he was leaning against the wall and his right hand was across his chest and it was that hand that was in the toilet. And of course we couldn't shock him. We (or I guess I should say I) bagged him and called maintenance stat to try wedge the hand out. And who do you think they left in charge to bag and try to wedge his hand out? Little ole' me - the aide. There was only enough room for me and him in there so I'm attempting to bag in between pouring soap in the toilet. No gloves and I didn't care. More worried about saving the guy. I bagged him, pulled at his hand really hard because at this time I didn't care if I had to break his wrist to get it out. I and he screamed!!! Yikes! I jumped back and landed on my butt which was covered in the urine which didn't make it to the toilet. Meanwhile, my coworkers are standing there telling me "why don't you try this or why don't you try that?" Ugh. The guy did end up living and we never had to shock him. Guess me trying to pull his hand out of the toilet brought him back. And the wife? She was worried about the watch that was on his hand. The nurses? Well, they irritated me a tad. THEY should have been in there at least trying to attempt to get a line. There was no IV access as the guy was seconds from being wheeled out but had to pee one last time.

And I had no extra scrubs with me but OB has extra scrubs. When I inquired about getting a pair of pants they said "well, we aren't supposed to loan out our scrubs." Okay, I'll just walk around with pee on my butt. They finally relented after I got snippy.

[liebling5, MSN, RN]

This doc charges up the paddles, yells "all clear", zaps the guy, screams like a woman, flies back against the wall with a crash, and slides to the floor with his mouth open in the form of the letter "O". I guess this doc was so free thinking that he didn't wear underwear under his scrubs. "It" had inadvertently fallen against the side of the guerney and took 300 jeules right through....well, you know.

OMG I nearly PIMP!!:imbar

[123456yy]

On the first or second day post-op, we always get orders to put our open heart patients in the cardiac chair. We had just finished helping one of my fellow nurses put her patient in the chair, when the monitor started alarming. Sure enough, the pt was in V-Fib. Oh crap. We all run in and are pulling the patient off the cardiac chair, and onto the bed, when i hear a funny little popping sound above my head and to the right. The spike on pressure bag for the CVP line on the Swan had been pulled out as we transfered the patient over. The 1 liter bag of NS emptied out in less than five seconds in the same way a balloon flies around a room when it is let go. I looked up just in time to get a full face blast, and then watch as in slow motion, the bag sprayed each of my co-workers, and the patient. When it was all over, fits of hysterical laughter alternated with chest compressions. When the er dor arrived, not 30 seconds later, he just looked at all of us and the soaking patient, shook his head, and said "tell me later." The patient made it!

[tvccrn, ASN, RN]

This probably isn't too funny and I feel bad for laughing. Had a pt who was being discharged after a MI. He had walked to the br by himself (wife in room). I was on the other end of the hall when the wife comes out of the room screaming that she needed someone stat. I run into the room not knowing what to expect. I don't see the pt on the floor so I go to the br. Keep in mind these bathrooms make airplaine restrooms look huge. The poor guy had collapsed and had his hand stuck down the toilet in the drain. And it was stuck good! Couldn't do compressions as he was leaning against the wall and his right hand was across his chest and it was that hand that was in the toilet. And of course we couldn't shock him. We (or I guess I should say I) bagged him and called maintenance stat to try wedge the hand out. And who do you think they left in charge to bag and try to wedge his hand out? Little ole' me - the aide. There was only enough room for me and him in there so I'm attempting to bag in between pouring soap in the toilet. No gloves and I didn't care. More worried about saving the guy. I bagged him, pulled at his hand really hard because at this time I didn't care if I had to break his wrist to get it out. I and he screamed!!! Yikes! I jumped back and landed on my butt which was covered in the urine which didn't make it to the toilet. Meanwhile, my coworkers are standing there telling me "why don't you try this or why don't you try that?" Ugh. The guy did end up living and we never had to shock him. Guess me trying to pull his hand out of the toilet brought him back. And the wife? She was worried about the watch that was on his hand. The nurses? Well, they irritated me a tad. THEY should have been in there at least trying to attempt to get a line. There was no IV access as the guy was seconds from being wheeled out but had to pee one last time.

And I had no extra scrubs with me but OB has extra scrubs. When I inquired about getting a pair of pants they said "well, we aren't supposed to loan out our scrubs." Okay, I'll just walk around with pee on my butt. They finally relented after I got snippy.

It's situation like this (well, not quite like this, but you get the idea) that has made it our policy that NO ONES IV is taken out until they are on the way to the door. I know of a couple of our nurses that won't even take out the saline lock until they are AT the door and the car is idling at the curb.

tvccrn

[patricelynne]

:eek:Re TVCCRN's statement about not removing saline locs 'til they're practically in the vehicle, when my honey & I were newly-married and he was in his internship in NY, I was nursing at a hospital across town. A 20-ish yr. old dying of liver Ca. was to be sent to the larger facility where John was practicing for a CAT, by ambulance. She'd been "weaned" off of steroids in the preceeding days and there was an order to remove the IV. No way! I made a heploc out of it, for luck, and sent her out in a claustrophobic ambulance in midday traffic jams in a snowstorm. Sure enough she coded in the scanner. John, in the ER that month, ran to help, and ---perhaps this was a blessing for her---she never knew what hit her and passed on. Being a teaching hospital, they hit her with everything and everyone they had. Had she no access there wouldn't have been one forthcoming. One of the anesthesiologists had had to find this one; her vessels were so scarred. Can you imagine what the jerk who ordered the IV to be d/c'd must have been not thinking with??? And they call some of them doctors....... "First, do no harm."-----Hippocrates-----

[JBudd, MSN]

Ministers' wives and kids........hard life, man!

What's really fun is walking into an ER room and telling one of your husband's deacons to take off his pants.

[Liddle Noodnik]

I could not get the blasted food out of her throat and let the (male) Med Aid take over...lol .. He got behind her and every time he did the upward thrust the patient let out a big ole fart....

I was laughing so hard that it was almost impossible for me to tell him his hands were in the wrong place....anyway we got her airway and her colon clear.......

I AM CRYING WITH LAUGHTER OVER HERE - THAT PICTURE IS PRICELESS!!!!!!!!!!!!! BEST ONE YET!

That's EXACTLY what I was going to post, NurseCherlove!

[Victoriakem]

"When he sat up it seemed his whole stomach pushed out like a fist was inside pushing out. It stuck out about a foot. When he went down, it went away and when he sat up out came this big thing. It kinda looked like the thing in alien right before it breaks out of the host body."

I am sitting here picturing this in my mind and trying not to fall off of my chair laughing!! Good story! Thanks for sharing!!:chuckle

Like the movie "Alien" with a toothy critter popping out of the abdomen!