Originally published at Nursing Studio. Please leave any comments there.
So in my blog reading here lately I’ve run across 3 stories I wanted to share with everyone.
- Another of Modern Medicine Horror Stories Tardive Dyskinesia from Knowledge of Health
- Nursing in Israel from it’s a nursing thing
- What Would Florence Nightengale Do? from emergiblog
The first one is a essay on TD and what causes it. Very informative. I found it on digg. Follow this link and digg it to get it higher in the web site so more people learn about it.
Second article is about an arab male nurse who lives in Israel. He’s one of the nurses who cared for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon when he had his CVA. Go read it. It’s inspiring.
Third article is about disaster nursing. You plan for disasters, but you never really know how you’ll respond until you are there. Kim is an ER nurse in SF which is on the fault line. Myself I’ve worked the night after a disaster. So here’s my story….
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3rd week of July of 2003 “gale force winds” came through Memphis, TN around 9 or 10 am. I was in my very last semester of nursing school (I graduated July 31, 2003) and was working as an extern in the ER of one of the downtown Memphis hospitals from 7 pm to 7 am. Traffic lights and trees were down all over town. Power was out all over town. Water was out to some areas. Temperatures were OVER 100 degrees. City goverment declared a 10 pm curfew for the entire town to prevent late night rioting.
My hospital lost water and power. The generators were running. We were on ambulance diversion because the OR had to be shut down from lack of water to scrub. But it seemed like every psych case in the city showed up for our ER that night because we were still open to walk in traffic. (I think they assumed we had air conditioning, which we didn’t because we were on generator, and came in to have TV which was playing in the lobby and lights.) We had a few patients in the ER who’s chief complaints were “we can’t take care of momma/daddy at home in the dark.” And then lots of abd pain and shoulder/arm/leg pain from cleaning up debris. Which required x-rays/CT scans. Now the CT scanner was in the same tower (this hospital had 5 towers, each tower had it’s own generator) as the ER, the ER xray department and NeuroTrauma ICU. So we were sucking some major power from our generator. Well around midnight we blew the generator. So we go scrounging for the flashlights. We find 3 for the whole department. I get all the nurse’s keys and a security guard and I go to the employee parking garage and go through all the nurse’s cars and get thier personal flashlights out of thier car so we have enough flashlights for everyone to have ones to round on our patients.
After I get back I’m told to go to NeuroTrauma ICU that they are having to move out of their department into another tower because thier ventilator batteries are failing. So I track up to NeuroTrauma which is almost black up there. They have 6 patients. 5 vents, 1 who was supposed to go to stepdown in the morning. All 5 vents are continiously alarming. The CV ICU census was down so they had consolidated to the A pod, the B pod was 5 beds and that’s were NeuroTrauma was relocating to. So we get the patients packed up and moved over 2 towers into the closed CV pod. The 1 who was supposed to go to stepdown got moved to stepdown a few hours early. (They called the doc and told them they were moving her and had no other choice and he was okay with it.)
I get back down to the ER after moving NeuroTrauma and the lights are still out in the tower we are in. The power has been off so long that our heart monitors that we had patients on went dead. BTW have you ever charted by flashlight? The 102 year old Momma decided that given being in the hospital in the dark and at home in the dark she would rather be at home. Our MD’s discharged her and off they went. And I’m sure Momma was a lot happier at home.
Anyway, about 30 minutes after I returned from NeuroTrauma, several of us smelled smoke. So the fire department got called to search for a possible hidden electrical fire. I tell you THAT is scary. We were still in the department. We still had patients in the department and fully suited firemen with oxygen tanks are searching for a FIRE. They didn’t find one, but that’s an experience I never want to experience again.
All total I think we spent 3 hours in the dark before they got the generator back up. But it did get the TV watchers and psych patients out of the ER. Guess they didn’t like the dark. We did get to keep one older gentleman who was sent by his family because they couldn’t take care of him at home in the dark. He just wanted to curl up and go to sleep.
Most of the city was without power with temperatures over 100 degrees daily for the next week. Alot of what we were dealing with was heat stroke, COPD exacerbations from the heat and from attempts to clean up after, or injuries from the clean up.
So always keep a flashlight in your car. And be prepared to move your patients at any moment.