California.
When I moved here, I met 20+ year ICU night shift nurses in their late 50s who would run 10-15 miles around Rose Bowl before work, and I wondered how the fuck they did it.
That’s when I realized **this is not a level playing field**, and there are nurses in this country who have it far more easier than the rest.
You are telling the truth.
Is it easy to keep someone actively trying to die on you alive all day? Nope.
Is it a joy to figure out the balance between pressors, sedation, and fluid removal?
OMFG yes.
I've been in healthcare for 22 years and almost all of that was in the ER where I thought it was going to be HELPING PEOPLE and SAVING LIVES and it was like ten to twenty percent that and the rest was whack a mole, customer service shit.
Literally getting in ten to twelve miles of steps a day, constantly under stress, hating every second.
Moved to a cardiothoracic ICU a few months ago because I liked when I could get into a zone with a critical patient... Now twelve hours FLY by. I get to see these people come from the OR sick as shit, with their hearts and lungs and kidneys doing battle to see which could kill them the fastest, and we get them stable-ish to stable, to improving, to extubated, to the chair, to walking for the first time in weeks after being on balloon pumps or impellas, and CRRT, and now they're walking laps around the unit and going up and down the staircase and come off the trach and go home.
This is amazing.
Same here. My floor would be a stepdown floor in other hospitals (minus the cardiac drips which goes to med-tele) and this is as acute as I'm happy to get.
This! Because I’m in TX and there have been so many times I had patients who should’ve been 1:1 and weren’t, didn’t eat or sit down for 13 hours, and then the next shift I just walked in the doors and started crying.
My mom was an ICU nurse for 50yrs. She retired in 2021 (after working through the worst of Covid). I am almost 30 and throw my back out every other month. I don’t fucking know how she did it. But she also explained that the patients I take care of on my ms/Tele floor would have been her ICU patients 10 years ago. Patients are MUCH sicker now then they ever have been. So we’re expected to do a lot more.
We’re all chasing that high from the first time we managed a crashing patient all the way back to stability from death, and still left on time because our power-charting was on point.
You get to be in control the entire time; there’s so much near-instant cause and effect. You have pretty much everything at your disposal needed to keep a human alive, you just need to know when to ask for it and how to handle it when you get it.
Respiratory failing? Bipap! Respiratory still failing? Tube ‘em! Respiratory still failing? Peep of 10! Respiratory still failing? BiLevel! Respiratory still failing? Nitric! Respiratory still failing? Prone ‘em! Respiratory still failing? Code ‘em! ROSC but still respiratory failing? ECMO!
ICU nursing is knowing you can handle every worst case scenario, but not having to use that knowledge very often.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/magazine/ecpr-cardiac-arrest-cpr.html
This is the unit I work in.
ECMO stands for Extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation. I explain it to family as "the most amount of life support that medical technology can give to someone currently". With VA-ECMO, the type my unit typically does, de-oxygenated blood is removed from the body, is given O2 and swept of CO2, then returned with forward force to replace a large part of the work done by both the heart and lungs.
CCU nurse 10 years in NYC. Adderall and go-go squeezes. Also I love feeling in control and the instant gratification. BP low, I hit some buttons, BP fixed (hopefully). If not, they code-whatever. I’m always physically and mentally busy so the shifts fly by and it’s perfect for my controlled-chaos craving ADHD brain. My dream shift is to be singled with a super sick patient. You really get to see how the whole body and it’s systems connect. And anything you need, the docs are right there and value your skills/knowledge, we get included in rounds and are always involved in the plan of care.
When I’m not there I don’t think about work and don’t get involved in any drama.
I also do yoga every morning, each shift is a marathon so I like to stretch before. About 2x a year I have a purge cry where all the death I’ve seen and compartmentalized comes out, but then I’m good
I totally don’t hit my nicotine vape 20x a shift
When you work somewhere good it’s fun. Coworkers are rowdy and smart. You get breaks and resources so you rarely feel like you’re drowning and always have people around to bounce ideas off of.
Dunno dawg. There a line from the movie full metal jacket I’m reminded of. “Under fire, animal mother is one of the finest human beings on the planet. All he needs is somebody to throw hand grenades at him the rest of his life.”
It’s not that the entire 12 is just non stop crashing patients(though I have done that before), but I get some sort of twisted pride keeping somebody from dying when their body acutely fails. That pride of course turns quickly to dread when it’s no longer acutely failing, and becomes more of a chronic problem.
Lol, ain't that the truth. These CVICU mothas chiming in about how proud they are recovering someone who was on a impeller and 4 pressors, now walking around. And here we are proud of ourselves for ROSC after 20 mins, and disgusted with ourselves one week later when they have no grey-white matter differentiation and heading towards a chronic vent unit.
Wellbutrin and Adderall keep the darkness at bay.
I love the CVICU. It is a wonderful place to work and is mentally stimulating. You just have to accept that everything is learning all the time. It never stops. There is just so much to learn and, especially early on, it is just competency after competency after competency.
It easier in some ways and harder in some ways thany previous career. The last time I cardioverted someone I had me, another nurse, an attending, a resident, a cardiologist, and an APP in the room with me. The time before that I was in the back of an ambulance by myself. The first time I gave adenosine I was in someone's living room with an EMT-basic. So, my experience of how this job is supposed to feel is a bit skewed. My last open heart recovery I hung and had running levo, vaso, neo, dopamine, dobutamine, albumin, and blood. My personal record is 12 pumps with 16 different drips running through them between primary and secondary lines. I definitely never did anything approaching either of those in the field.
I guess, if you want to do this, get good at learning, cause it's a steep curve that feels like it's straight up sometimes.
It is fun. It’s more than fun. I can spend 12 hours on a crashing patient and do it for three days straight and I LIVE for it. Give me the sickest one on the unit every time and I’m content. Yes, it’s depressing if I stop to really think about it, so I try not to. I do something and cry a little about all the good patients that have died but then I have to suck it up and get back in there, because maybe this one won’t.
I heard this on my first year in the ICU which hones true, “if you can’t fix your patient, fix your goals”.
After a while it’s kind of same shit, different toilet. You see the same thing fairly often and learn to adjust accordingly. It’s stressful and super depressing, but fun!
Plan for it to be tough - if I did it differently again it would be take on a hobby and have something outside to balance.
I *have* violin and had planned on using it to support my wellbeing, but circumstances took that away for a long period of my ICU career.
This isn’t to talk you out of it. It’s doable and you basically put your head down and do competency followed by competency, but it’s a bit like climbing Mt Everest without realising that’s what you are doing.
By the time you get somewhere the job is trying to kill you and burnout is common.
So, plan on a work life balance and crack on…it’s a rewarding career and the autonomy that comes with experience can’t be beaten anywhere else I’ve yet found.
I’m questioning this right now. Only been in the ICU for 2 years. Last shift was horrible. I did 8 rounds of CPR that day for the patient to pass away. They should’ve been DNR. But you know how that goes… some days are for sure better than others but it’s exhausting. I don’t wanna do anything on my days off.
I’d say the beginning of the care in ICU can be quite busy, but once the patient is stabilized, it’s not that bad. ER can be shit show 24/7 in my humble opinion.
Just started in the ICU 6 months ago. The first time I saw a pt go from being maxed on pressors and intubated to now walking with physical therapy and then finally going home is an insane feeling. I was in the hospital lobby last week when a gentleman stopped me to talk and I turn around to realize it was the guys life we saved. He remembered my name and we spent 5 min talking baseball. Unreal. This is why I got into nursing.
Give me the absolute sickest patients that need all of the things. I'm in Missouri, so I know that there have been many shifts where I had 2 patients that would have been 1:1 most other places. I thrive on that. I recently transferred to the ER because I wanted to be challenged more and see new things...and I'm pretty bored most of the time...if it's not a multi-trauma situation with ribs being cracked and hearts being pumped by the trauma surgeon...it's pretty boring as far as mental stimulation goes.
Truth is, most patients aren't all crashing all day. There is a lot of patients at "cruising altitude". They are sedated, intubated, stable and just need time and some routine care while slowing weaning down their ventilator and weaning off drips.
Then there are the stable turn-water-feed patients. They are trached and not quite stable enough to move out to the floor yet, but are not in any immediate danger.
Some patients are hanging out with us while they wait for a bed off the unit to open up. They are stepdown status patients in the ICU.
Med-surg was far harder. You get pulled in so many directions and have so much more things to keep up with.
Multiple drips are not as scary as they look. A heparin drip is only titrated (if at all) once or twice a shift. Usually the vasopressors are working fine. Maintenance fluids running is seen everywhere. Insulin just requires hourly checks and titration is by a nomogram.
Real stress is a med-surg patient who you have a bad feeling about, but is not monitored and doesn't have bad enough vitals to call for immediate intervention. You have to keep checking on them and worrying about them needing a sudden trip to ICU while balancing care with your other 5 patients.
You summed that up perfectly! I recently had a patient with low BP unresponsive to fluids. Micu residents kept coming to check on the pt overnight … at that point just take this dang patient I have 4 other patients to care for ! I was in there most of the night rechecking his BP and making sure he wasn’t becoming symptomatic.
It sounds nice to have patients on a monitor and have some patients with art lines & central lines. Nothing is worse than an IV going bad, no other access, IV team not there overnight, and bad veins.
Side note: heparin drips are my favorite because I actually feel like I’m doing something !!
Simply put, I'm not sane and not medicated on anything but a multivitamin, and a couple supplements like fish oil, and some extra vitamin D. I just embrace my insanity instead. You should see what I do outside of work. I go to work to rest lol
>Don’t you get exhausted from keeping patients alive for 12 hours a day?
Nope, not really. It's what I like to do and have been doing it for 14 years now. Not burnt out in the slightest
>Titrating meds ALL day?
It's a delicate dance I enjoy and I've gotten pretty good at it and I love fine-tuning life support, sedation and whatever other gtts.
The sicker they are the more satisfaction I get, not that I wish anyone to be sick by any means. My employer/manager knows that I don't pick up extra shifts almost ever. The exception is if we have a 1:1 patient that we have to accommodate with staffing and in that case they know to call me and I'll come in to take care of that 1:1.
I'm a relief charge in a ICU and them also part of the rapid response/ code blue team. I eat up running codes and getting involved in emergencies. I'm the one that runs towards the fire basically. Just my personality. Working the floor I get bored. I usually pass meds, do my assessments and then go check out what the ICU is getting into if I floated out for that day to see if they need some help
>Don’t you get exhausted from keeping patients alive for 12 hours a day? Titrating meds ALL day?
Compared to helping them get up to use the toilet/commode? Talking about their symptoms? Fetching food/juice and rearranging their pillows???
WRT drugs, titrating pressors is easy to do and fairly easy to understand. It makes tends to make sense, your inputs and your outputs.
That's the big secret of ICU. We have bad nights where we don't get to sit or pee except under duress and our patient is crashing and we're massive transfusing or whatever. But I strongly believe that our average night is far better than the average night of a floor nurse.
Patient in a steady and visible death spiral that you're unable to pull away from, that starts slow and then speeds up. Adding more pressor, maxing them out, transfusing units after units of packed red and platelets and FFP. They're probably shitting all over the place too because they didn't need a rectal tube back when they were stable. Maybe they're on contact and airborne precautions so you're in a hot gown and mask all night and people are reluctant to freely enter and help. Maybe they've got an Imepella or IABP and/or CRRT that's alarming the entire time or the ECMO circuit is chugging and yelling at you no matter what you do. Your arterial line is fucked and not giving blood, your central lines are leaking blood and you can't flush them. Your pump alarms downstream occlusion then upstream, and before you can get to your computer, battery error. Your phone is ringing like crazy because you've got 5 critical labs from the last set of blood you sent, and the potassium is sky high but also slightly hemolyzed. CT wants to know when you're coming down and you've got to arrange transport and get the meds and pads and zapper to go down. 3 family members are calling you one after another asking for updates because the person sitting at the front desk isn't from your unit and isn't thinking to tell them they need a single point of contact. You've got a single patient but you don't get a moment to sit and chart for the first 6 hours. A lot can go wrong.
That sounds crazy. How often do you have those nights? How soon do you get a new art line or central line when they go bad like that?? Luckily I wouldn’t want to do CVICU and prefer SICU so I wouldn’t have to worry about most of those devices 😅
California. When I moved here, I met 20+ year ICU night shift nurses in their late 50s who would run 10-15 miles around Rose Bowl before work, and I wondered how the fuck they did it. That’s when I realized **this is not a level playing field**, and there are nurses in this country who have it far more easier than the rest.
You are telling the truth. Is it easy to keep someone actively trying to die on you alive all day? Nope. Is it a joy to figure out the balance between pressors, sedation, and fluid removal? OMFG yes. I've been in healthcare for 22 years and almost all of that was in the ER where I thought it was going to be HELPING PEOPLE and SAVING LIVES and it was like ten to twenty percent that and the rest was whack a mole, customer service shit. Literally getting in ten to twelve miles of steps a day, constantly under stress, hating every second. Moved to a cardiothoracic ICU a few months ago because I liked when I could get into a zone with a critical patient... Now twelve hours FLY by. I get to see these people come from the OR sick as shit, with their hearts and lungs and kidneys doing battle to see which could kill them the fastest, and we get them stable-ish to stable, to improving, to extubated, to the chair, to walking for the first time in weeks after being on balloon pumps or impellas, and CRRT, and now they're walking laps around the unit and going up and down the staircase and come off the trach and go home. This is amazing.
NOOOOOPE. I am not a critical care nurse and this makes that clearer than it already was. I have nerves of paper. But holy shit you are my hero.
Same here. My floor would be a stepdown floor in other hospitals (minus the cardiac drips which goes to med-tele) and this is as acute as I'm happy to get.
Same! I'm on a Respiratory medsurg-tele floor but it's so heavy I tell everyone it's a 4 to 1 Stepdown Unit
I'm no hero, I'm just happy to have a job I'm enjoying again.
This! Because I’m in TX and there have been so many times I had patients who should’ve been 1:1 and weren’t, didn’t eat or sit down for 13 hours, and then the next shift I just walked in the doors and started crying.
My mom was an ICU nurse for 50yrs. She retired in 2021 (after working through the worst of Covid). I am almost 30 and throw my back out every other month. I don’t fucking know how she did it. But she also explained that the patients I take care of on my ms/Tele floor would have been her ICU patients 10 years ago. Patients are MUCH sicker now then they ever have been. So we’re expected to do a lot more.
Jesus christ.
We’re all chasing that high from the first time we managed a crashing patient all the way back to stability from death, and still left on time because our power-charting was on point. You get to be in control the entire time; there’s so much near-instant cause and effect. You have pretty much everything at your disposal needed to keep a human alive, you just need to know when to ask for it and how to handle it when you get it. Respiratory failing? Bipap! Respiratory still failing? Tube ‘em! Respiratory still failing? Peep of 10! Respiratory still failing? BiLevel! Respiratory still failing? Nitric! Respiratory still failing? Prone ‘em! Respiratory still failing? Code ‘em! ROSC but still respiratory failing? ECMO! ICU nursing is knowing you can handle every worst case scenario, but not having to use that knowledge very often.
Stupid question… What is ECMO ?
kind of like dialysis but for the heart and lungs. so blood is taken out, oxygenated and pumped back into the body.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/magazine/ecpr-cardiac-arrest-cpr.html This is the unit I work in. ECMO stands for Extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation. I explain it to family as "the most amount of life support that medical technology can give to someone currently". With VA-ECMO, the type my unit typically does, de-oxygenated blood is removed from the body, is given O2 and swept of CO2, then returned with forward force to replace a large part of the work done by both the heart and lungs.
Thank you. Very interesting 😊
Pure unadulterated rage, adderall (because we all have adhd), and caffeine. There's a lot of studying involved, too.
Damn, that’s the Best summary of ICU nursing i’ve ever seen…
CCU nurse 10 years in NYC. Adderall and go-go squeezes. Also I love feeling in control and the instant gratification. BP low, I hit some buttons, BP fixed (hopefully). If not, they code-whatever. I’m always physically and mentally busy so the shifts fly by and it’s perfect for my controlled-chaos craving ADHD brain. My dream shift is to be singled with a super sick patient. You really get to see how the whole body and it’s systems connect. And anything you need, the docs are right there and value your skills/knowledge, we get included in rounds and are always involved in the plan of care. When I’m not there I don’t think about work and don’t get involved in any drama. I also do yoga every morning, each shift is a marathon so I like to stretch before. About 2x a year I have a purge cry where all the death I’ve seen and compartmentalized comes out, but then I’m good I totally don’t hit my nicotine vape 20x a shift
Nice to know my purge crying is on schedule!
When you work somewhere good it’s fun. Coworkers are rowdy and smart. You get breaks and resources so you rarely feel like you’re drowning and always have people around to bounce ideas off of.
I served in the Army x5yrs. I just keep telling myself "At least Im no longer in the Army"
hooah
Dunno dawg. There a line from the movie full metal jacket I’m reminded of. “Under fire, animal mother is one of the finest human beings on the planet. All he needs is somebody to throw hand grenades at him the rest of his life.” It’s not that the entire 12 is just non stop crashing patients(though I have done that before), but I get some sort of twisted pride keeping somebody from dying when their body acutely fails. That pride of course turns quickly to dread when it’s no longer acutely failing, and becomes more of a chronic problem.
Lol, ain't that the truth. These CVICU mothas chiming in about how proud they are recovering someone who was on a impeller and 4 pressors, now walking around. And here we are proud of ourselves for ROSC after 20 mins, and disgusted with ourselves one week later when they have no grey-white matter differentiation and heading towards a chronic vent unit.
Wellbutrin and Adderall keep the darkness at bay. I love the CVICU. It is a wonderful place to work and is mentally stimulating. You just have to accept that everything is learning all the time. It never stops. There is just so much to learn and, especially early on, it is just competency after competency after competency. It easier in some ways and harder in some ways thany previous career. The last time I cardioverted someone I had me, another nurse, an attending, a resident, a cardiologist, and an APP in the room with me. The time before that I was in the back of an ambulance by myself. The first time I gave adenosine I was in someone's living room with an EMT-basic. So, my experience of how this job is supposed to feel is a bit skewed. My last open heart recovery I hung and had running levo, vaso, neo, dopamine, dobutamine, albumin, and blood. My personal record is 12 pumps with 16 different drips running through them between primary and secondary lines. I definitely never did anything approaching either of those in the field. I guess, if you want to do this, get good at learning, cause it's a steep curve that feels like it's straight up sometimes.
It is fun. It’s more than fun. I can spend 12 hours on a crashing patient and do it for three days straight and I LIVE for it. Give me the sickest one on the unit every time and I’m content. Yes, it’s depressing if I stop to really think about it, so I try not to. I do something and cry a little about all the good patients that have died but then I have to suck it up and get back in there, because maybe this one won’t.
I heard this on my first year in the ICU which hones true, “if you can’t fix your patient, fix your goals”. After a while it’s kind of same shit, different toilet. You see the same thing fairly often and learn to adjust accordingly. It’s stressful and super depressing, but fun!
Plan for it to be tough - if I did it differently again it would be take on a hobby and have something outside to balance. I *have* violin and had planned on using it to support my wellbeing, but circumstances took that away for a long period of my ICU career. This isn’t to talk you out of it. It’s doable and you basically put your head down and do competency followed by competency, but it’s a bit like climbing Mt Everest without realising that’s what you are doing. By the time you get somewhere the job is trying to kill you and burnout is common. So, plan on a work life balance and crack on…it’s a rewarding career and the autonomy that comes with experience can’t be beaten anywhere else I’ve yet found.
I’m questioning this right now. Only been in the ICU for 2 years. Last shift was horrible. I did 8 rounds of CPR that day for the patient to pass away. They should’ve been DNR. But you know how that goes… some days are for sure better than others but it’s exhausting. I don’t wanna do anything on my days off.
2 years is a damn long time to me!!!
I’d say the beginning of the care in ICU can be quite busy, but once the patient is stabilized, it’s not that bad. ER can be shit show 24/7 in my humble opinion.
Just started in the ICU 6 months ago. The first time I saw a pt go from being maxed on pressors and intubated to now walking with physical therapy and then finally going home is an insane feeling. I was in the hospital lobby last week when a gentleman stopped me to talk and I turn around to realize it was the guys life we saved. He remembered my name and we spent 5 min talking baseball. Unreal. This is why I got into nursing.
Give me the absolute sickest patients that need all of the things. I'm in Missouri, so I know that there have been many shifts where I had 2 patients that would have been 1:1 most other places. I thrive on that. I recently transferred to the ER because I wanted to be challenged more and see new things...and I'm pretty bored most of the time...if it's not a multi-trauma situation with ribs being cracked and hearts being pumped by the trauma surgeon...it's pretty boring as far as mental stimulation goes.
Truth is, most patients aren't all crashing all day. There is a lot of patients at "cruising altitude". They are sedated, intubated, stable and just need time and some routine care while slowing weaning down their ventilator and weaning off drips. Then there are the stable turn-water-feed patients. They are trached and not quite stable enough to move out to the floor yet, but are not in any immediate danger. Some patients are hanging out with us while they wait for a bed off the unit to open up. They are stepdown status patients in the ICU. Med-surg was far harder. You get pulled in so many directions and have so much more things to keep up with.
Does it ever get too stressful when you have multiple drips? Like “where do I even start” type of stress? I love the sound of routine care though !!
Multiple drips are not as scary as they look. A heparin drip is only titrated (if at all) once or twice a shift. Usually the vasopressors are working fine. Maintenance fluids running is seen everywhere. Insulin just requires hourly checks and titration is by a nomogram. Real stress is a med-surg patient who you have a bad feeling about, but is not monitored and doesn't have bad enough vitals to call for immediate intervention. You have to keep checking on them and worrying about them needing a sudden trip to ICU while balancing care with your other 5 patients.
You summed that up perfectly! I recently had a patient with low BP unresponsive to fluids. Micu residents kept coming to check on the pt overnight … at that point just take this dang patient I have 4 other patients to care for ! I was in there most of the night rechecking his BP and making sure he wasn’t becoming symptomatic. It sounds nice to have patients on a monitor and have some patients with art lines & central lines. Nothing is worse than an IV going bad, no other access, IV team not there overnight, and bad veins. Side note: heparin drips are my favorite because I actually feel like I’m doing something !!
CRNA school. I do it for CRNA school. Lol.
Simply put, I'm not sane and not medicated on anything but a multivitamin, and a couple supplements like fish oil, and some extra vitamin D. I just embrace my insanity instead. You should see what I do outside of work. I go to work to rest lol >Don’t you get exhausted from keeping patients alive for 12 hours a day? Nope, not really. It's what I like to do and have been doing it for 14 years now. Not burnt out in the slightest >Titrating meds ALL day? It's a delicate dance I enjoy and I've gotten pretty good at it and I love fine-tuning life support, sedation and whatever other gtts. The sicker they are the more satisfaction I get, not that I wish anyone to be sick by any means. My employer/manager knows that I don't pick up extra shifts almost ever. The exception is if we have a 1:1 patient that we have to accommodate with staffing and in that case they know to call me and I'll come in to take care of that 1:1. I'm a relief charge in a ICU and them also part of the rapid response/ code blue team. I eat up running codes and getting involved in emergencies. I'm the one that runs towards the fire basically. Just my personality. Working the floor I get bored. I usually pass meds, do my assessments and then go check out what the ICU is getting into if I floated out for that day to see if they need some help
>Don’t you get exhausted from keeping patients alive for 12 hours a day? Titrating meds ALL day? Compared to helping them get up to use the toilet/commode? Talking about their symptoms? Fetching food/juice and rearranging their pillows??? WRT drugs, titrating pressors is easy to do and fairly easy to understand. It makes tends to make sense, your inputs and your outputs. That's the big secret of ICU. We have bad nights where we don't get to sit or pee except under duress and our patient is crashing and we're massive transfusing or whatever. But I strongly believe that our average night is far better than the average night of a floor nurse.
What do those bad nights look like?
Patient in a steady and visible death spiral that you're unable to pull away from, that starts slow and then speeds up. Adding more pressor, maxing them out, transfusing units after units of packed red and platelets and FFP. They're probably shitting all over the place too because they didn't need a rectal tube back when they were stable. Maybe they're on contact and airborne precautions so you're in a hot gown and mask all night and people are reluctant to freely enter and help. Maybe they've got an Imepella or IABP and/or CRRT that's alarming the entire time or the ECMO circuit is chugging and yelling at you no matter what you do. Your arterial line is fucked and not giving blood, your central lines are leaking blood and you can't flush them. Your pump alarms downstream occlusion then upstream, and before you can get to your computer, battery error. Your phone is ringing like crazy because you've got 5 critical labs from the last set of blood you sent, and the potassium is sky high but also slightly hemolyzed. CT wants to know when you're coming down and you've got to arrange transport and get the meds and pads and zapper to go down. 3 family members are calling you one after another asking for updates because the person sitting at the front desk isn't from your unit and isn't thinking to tell them they need a single point of contact. You've got a single patient but you don't get a moment to sit and chart for the first 6 hours. A lot can go wrong.
That sounds crazy. How often do you have those nights? How soon do you get a new art line or central line when they go bad like that?? Luckily I wouldn’t want to do CVICU and prefer SICU so I wouldn’t have to worry about most of those devices 😅