Don't Count Your Chickens

After having such a quiet 2 hours to start my shift tonight it all turned pear shaped rather quickly.

Got paged to go and declare a man dead after he had developed an ischaemic bowel. It was pretty sad to have to go up to a family I've never met before and do all the 'death' stuff with them. This guy was lying there all blue and cold and they were still just sitting there stroking his lifeless hand.

I felt so useless as I just checked his vitals and signed the forms. Another perosn shuffling off this mortal coil.

But that was the 'easy' part of the night.

I had cleared the boards and it was looking like another quiet night so I nicked off to the psych dungeon to take a break when all hell broke loose. My pager beeped "MET CALL WARD X ROOM X". I ran like the wind up 6 flights of stairs to find a patient in AF and me having to stab around for his radial artery to do a blood gas. I missed and felt really stupid as the resident had a go... but she too missed... it ended up we had to have 5 go's and finally use his femoral to get it.

Then as we were trying to keep him from crashing again, another pager beep informed us of another MET call and meanwhile nurses kept tryign to inform me of other sick patients.

I spent the rest of the night trying to tidy up the wards and keep people alive until I finished.

It's a seriously scary system we work in when I am running aorund 5 wards trying to keep people alive till the next shift.

So I've just handed them all over to Dr M the night 'tern and hopefully she can resuscitate them if needed until the morning teams come and fix everyone up.

But as I said earlier... in the end.. everyone dies...