I started working at my hospital five years ago as a RN on the post-op orthopedic unit. Joint replacement surgery is elective surgery (not emergency or critical, per se) so patients go home typically by the third day. If we see someone on the unit for double-digit days then something is really wrong — usually that means cancer.
One morning I was taking over the care of a patient who just had a new hip or knee put in the previous day. Brenda, the overnight RN, was giving me report and I could tell she was frazzled by something that happened during her shift so I just settled back (which I’m told relaxes people) and let her tell me the story.
As it turns out, this patient, a frail thin woman in her seventies couldn’t metabolize the morphine we were giving her quickly enough which meant at one point she stopped breathing. With older patients we lower the morphine dose, which we did, but apparently we didn’t lower it enough and Brenda had to call the code which gets a whole lot of people running to the patient’s room to correct the problem. By the time I was getting report from Brenda everything was fine and she was literally cleaning up the the overnight activity.
Brenda mentioned something about using way more Narcan (morphine antidote) than one would expect. I didn’t appreciate what she meant until I peeked my head into the room, dropped my pen accidentally, bent down, and saw all these little broken ampules of Narcan under the bed. That was a lot of Narcan! Anyway, I went back out to finish report and the patient’s phone rang.
As Brenda was finishing we could here our lady talking to her family on the phone: “Hi, honey… Yes, I’m fine… How’s Tom?… Is he coming with you today?… The staff?… They’re great… but… oh, nothing… well, you know, honey….”
Brenda and I couldn’t help but eavesdrop…
“Honey, the staff here is great… but… well… they just don’t let you sleep.”
I swear I had to grab Brenda by the arm to keep her from running into the room…
Brenda turned to me, all red in the face and scream-whispered, “Woman, you almost died!!!”
