| second opinion |
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You know what it is like to be the new kid on the block. We had a nurse
who was fresh out of orientation and was assigned to the night shift.
She worked as our secretary before going into nursing. So she was not a
stranger to us or some of our patients on the cancer floor. As a secretary, she was under the care of our main cancer doctor ( oncologist). She complained of abdominal pain and she went to him. To make a long story short regarding her medical condition, she had a tumor on her pancreas. It was encapsulated and benign. He took care of her, so she was sort of a pet of his. Well now back to the nurse's story. She was working charge one night shift on the north station and I on the south station. She had one patient that was going bad. This patient was a No Code Blue (NCB or DNR). His blood pressure and other vital signs were dropping. She notified the doctor and he gave her orders to keep the patient comfortable. I helped her as much as I could in between caring for my patients on my end of the floor. She called me and told me that the patient was not breathing and she could not hear a heart beat. I told her to notify the doctor. She called and told him that the patient had expired. Back then you did not do anything else to the patient until the doctor came to the floor to pronounce the patient. Two hours went by and she still checked on the patient. This was her first death as a nurse. She was upset as we all were when we lost a patient. About 2 hours and 15 minutes the doc showed up and went directly to the patient's room to pronounce him. He then went to the nurse's station and found the nurse. He asked her to accompany him to the patient's room as he needed to show her something. When she walked into the room, she nearly fainted. The patient was sitting up on the side of the bed watching tv. She was at a loss for works ( for once in her life, as she was a motormouth). It seems that the morphine the doc ordered to keep the patient comfortable has slowed the patient's respirations and heart beat down so low that she could not observe them or hear a beat. The patient was just heavily sedated. For years he never let her live that episode down. I never got the chance to go see the patient after she thought he was dead due to the busy floor I was working. The north and the south end of the floor are two separate floors with the same type of patients. After that incident, whenever she called the doc to inform him that a patient expired, he always asked her " Are you sure this time?" She would say "Yes, I got a second opinion" |
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