Queen of....

Last winter I went through a tough spot in my nursing career. all 6 months of it. Over the course of December-February, I had a either a code blue or a rapid response every week. every-single-week. Not all the codes where my patients, but I worked them all. and to be honest, most were my patients. The first one never should have happened. A healthy 60-somethingish woman post heart cath... no complications, the most routine thing ever. Until she went into sustained VFIB and we had to shock her 3 times to get her out of it. Fortunately, she woke up and talked to us and actually made it out of the hospital alive. That was the only one of my codes that ever did that. There was the lady who blew her fem-pop, spraying blood all over the room. She didn't code, but came super close. There was the guy whose doctor I call 3 times over 2 hours telling him that something bad was going to happen, and it did. The guy's wife had to take him off the vent the next day. One day they floated me to 3north. The charge nurse assured me that I got the easiest group. 6 hours later as I transported my second patient to the ICU for post-op complications I realized there was no such thing as easy. There were more... on and on it went. I was on a first name basis with every ICU nurse there was. People started talking... and somehow I became known as the code queen. I am good at chest compressions... and let me tell you this, compressions on a 400lb man are SIGNIFICANTLY harder than on the little rubber dummy in class. So life was hard and I was about to think I was cursed and then it was march and I love march and people stopped dying and life was good again.


Until this week. In the past week I have had two patients fall. Hit the ground and do enough damage that I had to fix their problems. One dude was peeing blood clots after pulling his foley out... wasn't that fun to fix. My lady this morning slammed her hip into the ground... hopefully it isn't broken. 2 incident reports. 2 calls to doctors telling them I let their patients fall. I don't like falls. I don't like patients getting hurt on my watch. I don't like bad patterns either.


I really don't want to be queen of falls.