So the past couple of nights at work have been pretty eventful. Saturday night I had a little lady who developed respiratory distress and had to go to the ICU. Her pH (which is a level of blood acidity) was 7.0. That is almost incompatable with life so as soon as I got a bed in the ICU she was out of my unit. It felt good though to be able to catch it before we had to intubate her, although it did get pretty close. Then Monday about 12:30 or 0030 I got a sick little lady whose heart didn't like to beat to the same drum as everyone else's. She decided to have a little six second pause and then beat only 30 times a minute. Which could have been ok in some lifetime, except that she also had a blood pressure in the toilet, or 66/38. It was really exciting! I got the doctor over there, gave a normal saline bolus, pushed some atropine, and then with the aid of an ICU nurse titrated a Dopamine drip. Pretty exciting stuff for a lowly new grad cardiac nurse wouldn't you say?? It's that adrenaline rush that really brings it home. Some days I think that it would be really fun to be an ICU nurse for just that reason.
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