(I kid you not, this was what popped up in Google when I looked up solo and I love. it.
I doubt I will ever be as cool as Hans Solo but at least I have something to aspire to. You know, the medication thing I use kind of looks like his ray gun aka blaster...if you squint and close one eye and look at it from down the hall.)
After 2 years of school, countless clinical hours, and 12 weeks of orientation where I had an experienced nurse watch my every move, I was finally thrust upon my unsuspecting patient population this week. I was a little nervous and kind of excited. During my last week of orientation, the other nurses on my floor had been telling me horror stories of what happens during one's first week of being alone. I mean, HORROR stories. Like a patient started spewing #2 out of their nose and died within hours kind of horror stories. I. was. stoked.
I roll in for my first night and get ready for report. (I have a running diary of a day in my night almost finished. Then you'll understand what I mean by "get ready for report." It's complicated and involves filling my pockets. Prepare yourself.) I sit down with the first nurse of the night. She says, "Get comfortable. This is going to take a while." Never a good sign, FYI. And she wasn't exaggerating. This particular patient had 6 different medications going through the IV into a central line. (Note: a central line goes directly into the heart and into circulation. Even less room for error then normal.) They also had a critical medication that we only stock in small bags, so it had to be changed every 30 minutes.
To top it all off, the patient was at the end of the hallway. That's some excellent planning by whoever the bed planning people are around the hospital, I tell you.
I'm thinking "well, at least I'll get my exercise tonight." Let me tell you, I got that and more.
I was keeping up with everything pretty well in spite of the fact that my patient at the end of the hall was becoming more and more needy and as it turns out sicker.
The doctor kept ordering more labs to be drawn, more meds to be hung, etc. This was not a problem at all, except that approximately every third time I walked into the room, the patient would need to use the bedside commode and this would take at least 15 minutes. And when you are hanging meds every 30 minutes anyway...well, you can imagine that I wasn't left with much time in between for my other patients. At some point when I'm doing all these things, I start asking myself "Who am I?" Also, "Where did I get these mad skills?" [Apparently one does learn something in nursing school.] I mean I was even using fancy medical words with the doctor like "hypovolemia" and "supra ventricular tachycardia" and such.
Around 2 am, things took a turn for the worse. I was in the room once again helping the patient up to the commode, and thinking to myself "I need to call the doctor and tell her that the patient's heart rate is not returning to baseline. I don't think this increase is good." As I'm thinking through this, I look up at the monitor in the hall and see that my patient's heart rate is like 170 something. (Note: that is what I shoot for when I'm trying to get some good cardio in during a workout. It's problematic when one is sitting still and the heart is beating that many times in a minute.) I walk back into the room and ask the patient if they are having any chest pain or shortness of breath, etc.
This time, the answer is yes. At that point, I'm pretty sure my heart rate was matching my patient's beat for beat. I leap into action and grab a vital sign machine while hitting the call light. I get that blood pressure cuff on the patient in record time and another nurse comes in the room to help me. She goes and calls the doctor while I stay with my patient. Considering I had already talked to the doctor no less then 5 times that night about the same patient, I think she literally ran up to the room. They were already concerned about this patient hence the quick response. Thank goodness for that!
The doctor decides the patient needs a STAT (i.e. right now) transfer to ICU. Of course, first a bunch more STAT labs and tests have to be done. I'm pretty quick about that at this point, so I get those done with super efficiency.
I call the charge nurse, she comes up to help me and to make a long story short, we move my patient to ICU...on my first night flying solo.
So, I got to walk like 5 miles in my super awesome Shape-Up shoes, (hello toned backside) 2/3's of patients didn't go to ICU, and everyone was still breathing when I left in the morning.
That's what I call success.
