code blog: tales of a nurse

Last night, I was in charge. At one point, I had to move a patient from a private room into a semi-private room to accomodate another patient that was going to be transferred from another floor and would be requiring a lot of equipment. When I went to ask Patient #1 if this would be okay, he was very polite and agreed.

We started filling our beds, though, and when discussing Patient #1 with the nursing supervisor, we decided that we needed to get him out of CCU because after all, he wasn't on any titratable medications, vitals were stable, and come on - he was sitting up feeding himself dinner and reading the paper. Hello? Why the heck was this person in my unit? He could have been at home for heaven's sake.

Right as I was about to call the surgeon to ask if I could move this patient, I happened to look up into his room - and found him trying to get out of bed (he was stable, but still hooked up to an IV, EKG leads, a pulse oximeter, a blood pressure cuff, and a teeny bit of oxygen, all of which sort of have their own tubing and wire). I put the phone down and walked into the room to find him tangled up in all these tubes and wires, trying to get out of bed, while his wife sat calmly across from him. Watching. I asked what he was doing and he replied that he just wanted "all these wires" on one side. I explained that that would not be a good idea - we had left the wires how we wanted them; you know - untangled. He then said he just wanted to get up.

Sometimes getting up with all the tubes and wires is possible if, and only if, there is a nurse or aide to deal with the wires - keeping them untangled as the patient moves around. I explained this to the patient, and told him that maybe he should stay in bed for now (since I was intuiting that he wasn't quite all the way with us mentally anymore). He agreed, and when I got him all settled, he looked at me and said, "Now, I just have 3 questions, and I have to tell you - I think that they are VERY reasonable questions." I told him to ask away, but instead he kept trying to justify these questions to me, and kept saying how reasonable they were. I kept telling him to go ahead and ask. Finally he took a deep breath and asked me, "Okay. Now exactly how many input and output wires do I have?"

I have never been asked this question.

I explained the tubes and wires and what they were for. He then proceeded to tell me that he was an electrical engineer and that he now needed to know how many milliamps were flowing through these wires? My face must have been plastered with ignorance on this topic, because he then looked at me and said, "Oh, but of course you probably don't know that answer - but at least tell me, is there a ground for each of them? What kind of relay switch is back there? I'm assuming it can handle about 120 volts, oh.... but maybe not. Gosh, look at those bugs! Aren't they fascinating? Damn, there sure are a lot of them..."

On and on. I found some tactful way of saying that maybe he could put all of this electricity stuff out of his mind and try to relax, and he looked at me in the most comical way, like a crazy person in a cartoon would, and said, "But ... electricity is relaxing!"

Huh. I didn't know.