It’s been a week since I’ve had my first code at work. It’s been a week of replaying the scene in my head… of walking in and seeing my unresponsive patient… of seeing his eyes wide open and face turning blue… of desperately feeling for a pulse in his wrist and then his neck… and then his groin because that’s the strongest pulse you could feel and I desperately was hoping that what I was thinking wasn’t actually happening… of seeing his shallow and rapid breaths diminish right in front of me and seeing his face turn more blue than when I first saw him… of trying to reposition 200 pounds of dead weight because he was in the most awkward position I’ve seen… of feeling the crack of every compression that we needed so that we could maintain his circulation… of throwing my stethoscope around my neck to the corner of the room because they were swaying and hitting my body with every compression I was trying to do… of being in a room full of people, trying to be team leader of my first code… but failing because the anxiety of the whole situation was clutching and tightening my throat with every word I was trying to order out.
This was my very first code. And after quickly getting him on the monitor and having the second round of epi pushed, we quickly got a pulse back. We had barely started round 2 and we got the patient into a rhythm. Thank God. His color came back. He was not alert quite yet. But he had a pulse. In less than 5 minutes, we brought back an unresponsive and very sick patient. In a little less than ten minutes after the code was started, he was on his way to the ICU where he would go on to be extubated and stable enough to go to the oncology floor he should’ve been on in the first place. And might I add, very, very much alive.
Because I was at the right place and actually doing rounds on my patients at the right time… because I was responding to every call light my patients call for, I was able to respond to my patient almost immediately and save this guy some brain damage. Because of our awesome teamwork and great leadership on the unit I wasn’t a blubbering blob of jelly that I kind of felt like all throughout. My team gave me confidence and composure, and even though my hands trembled as I gave report to the ICU nurse and as I charted everything that happened, I was absolutely confident that we had done everything we could’ve done as quickly as we could’ve done it.
I just took a mock code class where our instructor told us that even for the most successful codes, a patient is sometimes not even on the monitor until 10 minutes after the code has been called. We had a crash cart in the room, leads connected to the monitor, ambu-bag in place within 2 minutes of everything happening. Tell me that isn’t awesome.
But now, it’s been a week. Because of that incident, I am literally on my feet all shift making sure all my unmonitored patients are still breathing. Because of that incident I’m so much more sensitive to the needs of my patients and my assessments are that much more thorough. Because of that incident, I’m a bit traumatized. But because of this, I feel like I’ve come out as a better nurse.
That’s all I can ask for. To be better. And I feel that every day I am taking the right steps towards that goal and that image of the kind of nurse I aim to be. I’m blessed to be in the presence of so many great nurses and even though I make several sacrificed to stay at this hospital, I’m 100% happy to be where I am. Now, I have six days off. That’s six days to recuperate and take care of myself. Because let’s face it, I need it. And the best way that I can take care of my patients is by first making sure that I’m 100% okay. Us nurses, we’re superheroes on the floor. But we need time and we need to constantly be making time for self-care too 🙂