my first code blue, guy ended up dying anyways, oh well Options

[forkee]

im bored at home so i guess ill bore the rest of you with my totally awesome hospital adventures (note sarcasm).

so 3 days a week i do clinical hours at the Veteran's Affairs Hospital in long beach for the spinal cord injury ward. its so awesome i even have my own government issued email address, ____@va.gov. hehehe. each day is fun filled with hours of bed baths, digital stimulations (if u dont know what that is, its best u dont), tracheostomy suctioning, foley/g-tube irrigations, and heparin injections. so this morning around lunch time we got a code blue. in hospital terms, this means cardiopulmonary arrest (the person has stopped breathing, and his heart has stopped pumping). I got to run to the incident with a respiratiory therapist. it was pretty crazy when we got there, as there were about 30 people all crowded around the guy that coded. they had already started CPR and were doing chest compressions and using the ambu-bag (the football looking thing) to fill his lungs with air. i jumped in the mix while nurses were injecting epinephrine and atropine into the body to try and trigger some type of reaction but nothing happened.

20 minutes later, we're still doing CPR while the doctors were trying to find a femoral pulse with some type of sonar device. time of death... 12:25 pm. it was an interesting experience. iv'e never seen a newly dead person before. i didnt know how to feel. a part of me felt sorry for this person whom i never new existed until 20 minutes previous, because at the time of his death, he had 30 people who didnt know him around rather than his family. another part of me didnt care, i didnt know this guy, i had to pee, and everyone was going to lunch without me (again). it was wierd. overall i guess i was happy that at least i tried. the prognosis wasnt good anyways considering the it was an elderly man with pulmonary edema. there was pink frothy stuff comiing out of his mouth while ambu bagging it. anyways, thats my story. not really climatic but i never write anything in off topic.

[1999GThatch]

"code blue: ER. STAT." hahaha the familiar sounds of the workplace....