LAST THING THAT I HAD HEARD YOU WERE DOING JUST FINE...

"...When I walked in there, into that room, I was totally taken aback by this patient's state. He was totally covered in blood, his face, dried blood, dripping from his nose, blood all over his hands, all over his sheets. I just went into a sudden state of shock. I almost wanted to cry. It was ridiculous. He was restrained...and I'm just totally shocked..." - Sharon Eifried (Bearing Witness to Suffering: The Lived Experience of Nursing Students).

This is not unlike my situation on Tuesday. After hearing the emergency call bell I ran into my patient's room to find him covered in blood, pulse-less, and unresponsive. The next hour was the most organized chaos I've ever observed or experienced in my life. 30 some odd people cramped into a tiny 4 bed room, people running in and out of the room grabbing crash carts, suction sets, gowns, intubation tubes, gowns. I primed lines to bolus the patient with NS. As calmly as I could muster I gave the code team a full report of the patient's medical history. Finally he was intubated and brought to the ICU. The team continued to work on getting an art line. I gave report and left. The patient was still unresponsive...

Not sure if there was anything I could have done to prevent this, but for the rest of my day and the following day (and hopefully for the rest of my career) I read up on as much patient history as I could and kept an extra close eye on my patients - to the point where I started to annoy them a little bit...