This week I wrapped up my senior internship with the tiny, little humans. As excited as I am to be done, (and make no mistake, I am crazy excited to be this close to graduating), I loved being at the hospital and was a little bit sad to be done with that part of my learning experience.
My last day was C-R-A-Z-Y! My preceptor and I admitted three surgery patients in three hours. It’s crazy because surgery patients have to be checked on quite often (like every 15-30 minutes) and a couple of them were stay-over’s so we had to do full admission paperwork on them. One of the patient’s was a little person, so it took a lot longer to get him/her settled down. You know those days where you feel like you can’t even take a break to run to the bathroom? Yeah, that was me on Thursday.
Funny story. At one point I was standing at the monitors at the front desk trying to admit my patient so they would show up and I could monitor the heart rate. All of a sudden the red alarm went off. (Red alarm=bad, just FYI.) It showed that one of the patient’s in one of rooms heart rate had dropped to like 44 beats a minute. This is WAY to slow for a little person. It’s a condition we call bradycardia. (I know my impressive use of medical terminology is, well, impressive. No need to comment on it. I’m aware.)
In about 0.5 seconds the following thoughts went through my mind:
1. “Is that my patient?”
2. “What bed is my patient in again? A or B?” (It’s how double occupancy rooms are described.)
3. “Holy crap! Who cares? That patient’s heart might be stopping. I’m going in.”
So I start to run into the room and have the following other thoughts:
1. “What happens if his/her heart rate doesn’t come up after I rub their chest?”
2. “What was that code number again?”
3. “And what are compressions?!?!”
Never fear, the patient was fine. It was a little bit of a machine connection malfunction. But still…it’s always exciting when the red alarm goes off.
To summarize: great experience, learned a lot, had a blast. Now, if only I could find a job...
