Blame it on the moon...

This is my first post about my summer job. I am working as a nurse extern at a hospital; overall, I am learning a lot and getting good experience. So it's really kind of an inaccurate depiction of things that the first time I would write about it would be after an absolutely insane day.

For the first time I saw a man die. They called a code and were starting to pull out the code cart when his nurse was like "no, no, he's a DNR" - and his chart was checked, and indeed he was. A young woman just down the hall began to sob, loud and scared - she had just gone for some ice water or something down the hall, stepped out of his room for a minute, and he had coded while she was gone. His heart on the monitor was a confusion of jagged, irregular, tight spikes, and his face graying, jaw set, contorted as though with effort. The hall was filling with staff, responding to the overhead call. They were told the patient was DNR, would turn away with a look of sad resignation.

It is an odd feeling to look upon someone who is arresting, and to do nothing. To watch someone who is alive become someone who is not.

But it was best not to stand by in the hall idly gawking (which is how I felt...gawking) while the family stood, shocked and grieved, awkwardly in the hall, as though too terrified to go into the room. You know they hadn't thought it would be this soon. So I tried to move on to my other duties quickly.

A lot of other things happened...it was just a completely nuts day....one patient fell and got a bloody nose, as well as a nice laceration to the forehead. He went down for some diagnostic testing to see how badly he had been hurt; turns out he is fine, and just will have a black eye for awhile, as well as some steri-strips to approximate the wound on his forehead. Another patient accidentally pulled a jackson-pratt drain out of his bandaged foot. Then there were four or five patients over the course of the day whose IVs went bad, either because they had pulled them out, or they had begun infiltrating. One woman's IV came out almost inexplicably. She was a patient who required a sitter, and I was sitting beside her in a chair, when her hand began to drip copious amounts of blood. Her IV, swathed in curlex and tape to prevent her from pulling it out, had somehow dislodged. Seriously this woman was sitting perfectly still. The inordinate amount of bleeding was due to the fact that she was on heparin therapy for multiple blood clots in her legs. You have never seen blood leak out of someone so fast as a patient who is on heparin. It took ten minutes of pressure to her hand to stop the bleeding, while my preceptor established another IV.

But there really were some lovely patients today as well. As some of you may know, "my song" is Simon and Garfunkle's "Cecilia" - a catchy ditty totally sketch verses. A lot of people start singing it when they meet me (seriously). So anyway, some of these old-timers, the 85+ crowd, is doing the same thing - except with a different song. "Whispering" Jack Smith (ok?) had a minor hit in 1925 with a song called "Cecilia, Does Your Mother Know You're Out?" (rerecorded in the 60's by Tony Randall), and these old ladies sing it to me!

Does your mother know you're out? Cecilia,
Does she know I'm about to steal ya?
Oh my when I look into your eyes,
Something tells me You and I should get together
How's about a little kiss, Cecilia
Just a kiss you'll never miss, Cecilia
Why do we two keep on wasting time
Oh, Cecilia say that you'll be mine.

You've got to admit...much sweeter than Simon and Garfunkle's iffy sketch girl.