Saturday, August 10, 2002

Tonight we had a Code Blue. It's different from the Code Blues you see on medical shows, like ER, where everything is wonderfully choreographed and the hot hunky doctor ends up saving the day. It's intense, but rather, it's more people standing around a bed monitoring and watching more than anything else. The patient usually has a tiny room, and about 12 people are trying to move about, ventilating, intubating (where they stick that tube down the throat), and sometimes defibrilating (that whole thing where someone holds the paddles [usually the hot, hunky doctor who ends up saving the day] and yelling, "CLEAR!!" then shocking the patient). The patient's nurse stays with the patient all the time, and the other floor nurses run back and forth and do things for the other patients and the nurse involved in the code. One nurse usually monitors vital signs every 2-5 minutes, and records everything that happens, and what time it happens. The code team consists of a couple of respiratory techs, who usually do the ventilating, the medical-respiratory resident, a couple of med students, and an anesthesiologist, who is usually a God send at this point in time, because he's the one who usually knows exactly what the hell is going on. The other docs main job is to form a big pow-wow and decide which ICU the patient will go. Sometimes if there aren't ICU beds, the pow-wow turns into heap big pissing contest. But we were lucky last night and the patient had her pick of ICU beds in a variety of ICUs.


I know I sound crass, but I really really hate codes.


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