I had a not so pleasant evening yesterday. I am sent to a nasty step-down and given the worst patients on the unit (float nurse special). One in particular was nasty awful and foul. I was warned during report and I decided to see her first just to get the initial meeting/assessment out of the way.
So, I enter the room as the tech is leaving and under her breath I hear her say, "I am not coming back in this fucking room again." Yikes! I enter, gather some meds from the drawer and the patient starts demanding this and that. In my best customer service voice I attempt to explain that I am getting her meds ready and will get to everything she is demanding. I swear I am in the room 10 minutes and it is all I can take. I will not go into details of how horrible this woman was, but I walked out on her.
I was putting drops in her eye when she decided to scream out orders. It got to a point where I looked at her and said, "I am done here." "you are not listening, you are being unreasonable and I will return in a few minutes and we can try this again." She then demanded I call her physician. She screamed that I call her physician to which I said no.
I was pissed and had to get away from this fucking crazy bitch. I went saw my other patients and some overbearing family etc.. and returned to the evil one 30 minutes later. She was actually better and allowed me to give her meds and get done what I needed. I even gave her the phone and dialed her crazy daughter's number. The next 3 hours went along okay.
Here comes 1900 and I have informed the charge nurse that if they want me to hang around til 2300 someone else needs to take the crazy lady. The techs refused to enter her room and the other nurses will not go near the room. I explained how I felt lightheaded and may need to leave if I still had the crazy lady with the other patients I was given (four corners of the floor, 3 isolation, 3 with major psych issues and family drama).
She agreed to divide up the load to make it more fair and take the nasty lady away from me. It is 1900 and I begged the tech to come in the room to reposition the woman. We got her situated in bed and the woman actually thanked us. I am outside the room doing a last bit of charting when the nurse watching the monitor tells me the patient's heart rate is dropping in the 20s.
My first thought is she has displaced a lead or something so I go in the room followed by the tech. The woman is unresponsive and the tech ask is we need to call a code and I am like - go ahead.
The fat nasty bitch coded on me just when I was getting rid of her! This was the first code I have been involved with in this facility and on a freaking step-down! I felt out of sorts and did not know where anything was and seconds later the room was packed with everyone!
My thoughts were that the residents calling the code were disorganized and I wanted to just take over, but way too many voices. Plus it was so hard to find a pulse of this fat ass nasty woman.
She got tubed, we got a rate back and she got shipped to the unit. I kept hearing from the others how smooth the code went - not my assessment at all, but I am an outsider here!
It did make me really want to return to full time critical care! I miss it so much!!!
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