scary scary night in icu

Nurses General Nursing

Published

Specializes in Getting my LVN first, the onto my RN!!!!.

I have never been so scared working in a hospital as I was tonight. We had a patient in neuro ICU that was etoh withdrawl. He had been pretty mellow all night and the dr had started to wean him off of his sedatives. About 5 am all hell broke loose, a nurse saw from the desk that he was trying to get up and called for help. By the time we got there, he was out of bed, jabbing the iv pole at us and swinging and kicking us. We called security, the coordinator, and the supervisor and nobody came, finally, one of the nurses went to another icu to get some male nurses to help out. The male nurses were there before any security bothered to show up. I was honestly scared out of my mind. This man was really trying to attack us and didn't want to just run away, he wanted to hurt us.

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Specializes in Gerontological, cardiac, med-surg, peds.

Definitely write up a facility incident report, detailing everything. Glad you weren't injured.

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Specializes in Nephrology, Cardiology, ER, ICU.

Call the police! And...yes write up an incident report.

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Specializes in Gerontology.

Doesn't your hospital have a policy for dealing with aggressive pts? Ours is called Code White - you call that and immedicatly get security, extra nurses and the psych nurse comes with drugs and restraints.

Write an incident report, document, and next time if you don't get help, call the police!

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