Nursing stories

I think there are a few stories from my nursing experiences that I will never forget. This week, I've been blessed with two.

This week, I cared for the oldest person I have ever met. She was 104 years old. Unfortunately, she passed way on my shift, but I found myself completely amazed when thinking about how much she must have seen since 1903.

The other experience was a patient who self-extubated. When a person is intubated (meaning they have a tube into their lungs and on a ventilator to help them breathe) we take safety precautions to ensure they do not remove the tube on their own. This consists of placing the patient in soft wrist restraints, as a minimum to tie their hands to the bed and prevent them from reaching up and pulling it out. In addition, I even had mitts on my patient (they cover the hands and prevent someone from grasping anything). I was going to grab a quick breakfast snack, reported off to another nurse, checked the patient (who was sleeping, restraints intact) and returned 15 minutes later to discover he somehow, despite the necessary precautions, had managed to remove the tube. Fortunately, in this case, he did fine without it and managed to remain off the ventilator throughout the day. However, I still have to report this in an official "occurrence report" that gets sent to my manager. Of course, only the day before the entire unit received an email from our manager about how last month we had 2 self-extubations and a fall. This was unacceptable, yadda yadda yadda. So I don't relish the thought of having to explain this to my manager, but I am very thankful that the patient did well after this incident! The kicker is that this patient had severe lung disease due to smoking and the first thing he says to me is "can I have a cigarette?"

Perhaps there is a greater lesson here, too. Preparation for parenthood. No matter how much we try to maintain our patient's safety, we cannot be completely responsible for their actions. I imagine the same is true for children.