First FULL WEEK Recap

After being with my mom for 2 weeks and doing nursing orientation for 3, I finally completed my first full week of work. I worked about 44 hours this week...so I'm exhausted! Basically I transferred some patients to the floor, gave lots of injections, primed tons of IV tubings, and gave tons of IV antibiotics. Exciting, yes I know. Oh yeah, on Wednesday I wasn't the primary, but the secondary nurse on a case coming in from the OR. I received a neuro case...a craniotomy. So my role as the secondary was to hook up the foley to the criticore machine, set up the SCDS, and get his labs done.

Oh and then yesterday I was all set to take care of my one patient, then his heart rate starting going up. He had been in Sinus Tachy all morning...the highest his HR went up was 131. But the new resident was adament about pushing Adenosine. She wanted to stop his heart and let it re-start so she could see his underlying rhythm. All the nurses were like "WTF? Why?" Apparently she thought he was in SVT, but my charge nurse/manager was like "His HR is only in the 130s...that's not SVT. She's gonna stop his heart" and then she was all annoyed. But then the Attending came in and wanted the Adenosine, too. So we let the MDs push Adenosine twice. His HR was still up, so we gave some Metoprolol and that seemed to bring his HR back to the 110s. So all day with him I kept reminding him to use his PCA Dilaudid for his pain (he was s/p R Hip ORIF) and titrating his insulin drip. Kept me pretty...

...THEN next door my preceptor received an emergent case from the IICU. This guy was in respiratory distress. He was brought up and sedated and intubated immediately. Julie (my preceptor) and Karen (another nurse I work with when Julie's off) told me to jump in. So they gave me the Emergency Medication (NON-CODE) sheet to fill out. My job was to write down what the MDs and nurses were giving, what time, and how much. We had like two pages of meds once we got him stable. I also did his ABGs and was the one calling out all the abnormal data like low BP, low MAPS, and low sats. It wasn't a CODE situation and I didn't have anything super crazy to do, but it was exciting to get in there and be considered part of the team.

So yes, I am here exhausted now. haha.

Mary needs to start a blog so she can tell us how here preceptorship is going *hint hint* =)