Week Four

Spring Semester, Week 4.  Not that it is feeling like spring.  I came home today and put on thermal underwear.  Thermal underwear!  This is Sydney!

Right, change of pace. I've been thinking a lot this week about how easy it is to kill a patient.  Very very easy.  Imagine the following situation: it's an emergency, someone is in cardiac arrest, you've got two syringes in a kidney dish, both are clear solutions.  One is adrenaline to get the patient's heart started again, the other is normal saline.  One can save your rapidly deteriorating patient, the other won't do much at all.  They look the same and you're stressed out, trying  to act as quickly as possible.  You grab the wrong syringe.  BAM!  Potentially fatal error.  Or this one: the doctor has charted IV therapy but it's your job to get it ready and start it up.  IVs are Nursing 101, nurses put them up all the time.  All you'd have to do is forget to shut a valve, thereby letting an air bubble into the tube that then travels into the patient's vein and then their heart.  BAM! Potentially fatal error.   Or you don't use the proper aseptic non-touch technique, your patient's cannula gets infected, the infection kills your immuno-compromised patient.  Or medication errors.  It may be the doctor who makes the initial mistake of a wrong medication, dose or route, but you the nurse are also responsible because you are administered the drug.  Scary, isn't it!

Having said that, learning to how to prime an IV line and get it going was SUPER FUN*.  This week we also covered the Glasgow Coma Scale, and infant and child CPR, and had what must now be our fourth or fifth lecture on asthma in children.  Having said that, two weeks ago, a child in NSW died from their asthma, so I guess another asthma lecture isn't the biggest hardship.

Other exciting things we've been looking at lately include cardiac rhythm identification and inserting oropharyngeal airways.  These scare the bejesus out me.  Our lecturer assured as that it doesn't hurt to have a Guedel's airway inserted, but since the patient is unconscious, how can you be sure?  Here's a picture: tell me that doesn't hurt!

Do you know what one of the most satisfying things is?  Watching medical dramas on TV and understanding some of what they say, or picking up when they say things that are blatantly wrong.  The prime example is related to cardiac rhythms and defibrillation, i.e. when can you shock a patient?  The movies and television show us that you can shock a patient who is flat-lining.  WRONG!  Flat-lining aka asystole means that there is no electrical conductivity in the heart, so there is nothing to shock.  
*mature student alert

Anyway, enough of my blathering.  See you in Week 5!