As 19 hour shifts go, this was a good one.\u00a0 I got to work at 5:30 to start setting up for the day.\u00a0 The first patient I was supposed to do as a portable in her room.\u00a0 Her dark, warm, room that was not in the ICU, she was just on isolation for flu.\u00a0 I was not happy about spending the morning in there wearing a hot gown and mask in this yucky room with what turned out to be a very crabby, whiny lady.<\/p>\n
But hurrah!\u00a0 Someone in the ICU showed up who was more emergent so I started on her instead.\u00a0 The second lady was in kind of scary shape.\u00a0 Her K was 6.9 and her heart was in a wide QRS tachy complex.\u00a0 While I was setting up machines her telemetry was dancing all over the place with missed beats and other scariness.\u00a0 They had an AED next to her just in case.\u00a0 But lo, within 20 mintues of me starting treatment she smoothed out into a sinus rhythm.\u00a0 Science is real, yo.\u00a0 I was happy about that, plus she had a really nice nurse for me to work with.<\/p>\n
I was ready to head back to the main HD room of craziness, but another ICU emergency appeared.\u00a0 This one a patient I know very well who had a K of 8.0.\u00a0 Geez, people!\u00a0 Again, within an hour she was doing much better.\u00a0 These two portable treatments were very low stress compared the frantic pace of working a Monday in our room.\u00a0 I even finished a book.<\/p>\n
So when they told me I had to stay because I was on call to do two patients in our unit who wouldn’t be done until midnight, I was ok with that.\u00a0 I was long over due for some call back.\u00a0 I have pretty good luck with not having to go in very often.\u00a0 I took a real dinner break before going up there around 8:30.\u00a0 My first patient came off about 30 minutes after that and I was down to one really nice guy who just couldn’t breathe well.\u00a0 It was cool to be able to get him from 10 L at 88% to 5 L oxygen at 100% as the treatment went on.\u00a0 There was a fair amount of chores to do that the day team didn’t have time to get done, so that kept me occupied.\u00a0 When the timer rang I quickly got the patient out of the room (yay for fast clotters!)\u00a0 and got in my bed by 1:30 am.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
The saddest part of the night was when Brian texted me to say trivia round 7 was about musicals!\u00a0 Boo!\u00a0 Wish I could have been there.\u00a0 Oh well.\u00a0 Not bad.\u00a0 Not bad at all.<\/p>\n
(PS: Potassium (K) should be between 3.5 and 5.0.\u00a0 You can get admitted for dialysis when it’s at least 5.2.\u00a0 Higher than 6.0 things get a little scary for your heart).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As 19 hour shifts go, this was a good one.\u00a0 I got to work at 5:30 to start setting up for the day.\u00a0 The first patient I was supposed to do as a portable in her room.\u00a0 Her dark, warm, room that was not in the ICU, she was just on isolation for flu.\u00a0 I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1926\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}