What was the longest code you have been in?

Ok. Saddest forum ever I've never had a code. I'm not a nurse....yet. This is the part of nursing that I will dread.

DebblesRN, what was the worst????

1.5 hours post cabg with internal cardiac massage. Walked out of the hospital 3 months later.

3 hours. Overnight observation after a very minor surgery. Had a STEMI. Poor new grad nurse thought she killed him with the 2mg morphine she gave him. We eventually got a heart rate in the 20s and paced it up. He walked out a month later.

Probably 2.5 hours out of a 3 hour span (got him back twice before someone could track down something akin to a family member). Guy was found down and burning for an unknown period of time. Probably a 90%+ full thickness to the bone in some parts. Already in DIC when we got him to the floor. Everyone got fluid resistant gowns and face shields that day.

DebblesRN, what was the worst????

I work with babies mostly, so you can imagine when I go to a code it is highly unpleasant. The parents from the 5 hour code were distraught but held it together. They cried, but no screaming or anything like that.

The worst code involved a Full term baby. Her mother had to have a C/S with general anesthesia because they were losing the baby's heart rate. We coded the baby for 25 minutes and never got a heartbeat.

Mom came out of anesthesia screaming. She wanted her baby. The Neo and I had to go and tell her. She did the talking, I was mostly there for moral support and the mother totally lost it and started screaming. It was the worst, saddest thing I have ever seen working OB. We gave her the baby and she screamed some more. She begged us to fix her. She begged us to try a little longer. She begged and bargained with God.

Mom had no family and the father had skipped out on her. All she had was that baby and a lady from her church that had come to be moral support for her that she had only known for a couple of months. Just made me sad that there was no-one there for her on probably the worst day of her life.

wow , just wow incredible story's , very sad story's i cant ever image being on the non nursing side of something like this

not actual full codes, but i had a youngish (43) guy once who had to be defibrillated about every 45 minutes, day and night, for a couple of weeks. it was a long time ago and we didn't have internal defibs then. we had him on every known antiarrhythmic, lytes optimized, oxygen optimized, but he just had a really lousy heart with disseminated arteriosclerosis and they couldn't bypass him. we put new hires in his room every shift to watch the regular nurse and give them defibrillation practice. he hated the shocks and would cry out, "hit me harder! hit me harder!" for the sternal blow, but that never worked and we would wait until he passed out and then shock him again. awful.

we transferred him to his home hospital after we determined he was too old for transplant. his antiarrythmic drip ran out en route and he arrived in vt, and this time they couldn't get him out of it. i loved that guy and felt so bad for his family.

Not the longest, we coded her for about an hour and got her back, but through out the night we coded her 8 times and kept getting her back with the second epi, only for her to code again a little while later. The worst part was her daughter who was admittedly high on heroin would scream during the code "momma momma don't go". By the time the called it after the 9th code on one shift, her sternum was notably in pieces and bright red blood was foaming out of the ett.

4 hours, on a 9 mo old ex preemie. They put her on ecmo and everything (never mind that she didn't qualify). Parents had already lost another baby and were asking for a heart transplant throughout the code. Nursing asked multiple times during it to stop but the 3 attendings wouldn't. It was awful

4 hours: 60yr old female pt walked in c/o chest pain, codes 10min after arriving to treatment room. She was intubated, had arterial/central lines placed, levophed & epi drips, copious amounts of red frothy blood continuously pouring out of ETT, requiring frequent in-line suctioning just so we could bag her, myself and the RT at the head of the bed literally were wearing pt gowns (closest thing the tech could find to give us b/c we were getting covered in blood from the ETT). Every time pt went into asystole we'd do cpr, after a few minutes the pt would open her eyes and get a rhythm back, then lose it 5-10min later and we'd start cpr again and she'd open eyes/pulse returned, only to lose it again.. and the whole thing would keep repeating...

After the 3rd hour cardiology comes down and places an intra-arterial balloon pump (almost never happens in the ED), and plan to take pt to cath lab once its ready. Theory was a massive cardiac thrombus, or PE and hoped they could remove it and she'd stabilize since she kept responding to the cpr/epi and is somewhat stablized with the IABP.

Just before shift change (4th hour of code), cath team arrives and we all take pt to cath lab and as I'm leaving to return to ED, pt starts coding again..

Later I'm told she DID have a massive coronary thromboembolism, made it to cardiac ICU but died later that afternoon.

It had to be the bloodiest non-trauma resuscitation I've ever seen, with two suction canisters full of blood, the floor covered in it as well as myself and RT's scrubs, yuck!

Sent from my SPH-D700 using allnurses.com