Succs Sucks!

I already knew it was going to be a busy night. We were short again and I had 7 patients instead of the normal 5. I quickly peeked in every one's room to introduce myself and all was well, so decided to assess my "easiest" patient first as everyone was stable.

I quickly did her assessment and asked if she wanted anything for pain as according to the chart, it was time for her to have either a pain pill or an IV injection is she so desired. She declined and I went about my merry way. This young girl was in for a lap chole. She was doing well and the plan was to discharge her in the morning.

About 20 minutes later I had a confused little old lady's bed jacked up trying to put a new IV in as she had pulled out her previous one in the last 5 minutes, despite the restraints. I heard a code being called but didn't get the room number. The door was open and I did not see anyone out there, so I continued.

After a few minutes I saw one nurse come running down the hall. I asked what was going on and she told me the room number for the code. "OH shit!", I think --I hadn't even realised it was on our floor and plus---it was MY room! That EASY patient! What the hell.

So I lowered the bed and tied my lady back up as quickly as I could. When I got down the hall and into Easy's room, I see chaos. The room was full and as I scanned it, I see the patient's husband in the corner right outside the bathroom holding up a syringe with an orange sticker on it. I jabbed my way through the crowd and asked him what he was holding. He said he didn't know, his wife had taken it to the bathroom and must have given herself some of it. I jerked the syringe out of his hands and read the label: SUCCINYLCHOLINE.
"Holy SHIT", I thought and made my way to the bedside yelling that the patient shot herself up with succs. No one seemed to hear me so I kept repeating it and tried to get Kellie to hand me the amboo bag. The patient was fairly purple and the sats were reading in the 40s. For whatever reason, Kellie was concentrating on shoving a nasal cannula as far up my patient's nose as possible even though her mouth was wide open. It was actually quite comical after the fact.

By the time I finally got the amboo bag and was trying to pump some kind of oxygen in, Easy was making those snoring/snorting sounds and her color and sats were getting back to normal. I had laid the syringe on her chest-there was quite a bit still left, and the code MD picked it up asking where it came from. I said I had no idea, we don't keep that on the floor at all and the husband said the patient had it in the bathroom.

Easy opens her eyes looking shocked. I nudged her shoulder and said (probably yelled),"WHAT were you thinking?"

I got no immediate answer of course, but saw that she was now stable and I had to get out of the room before I hit her. Now, of course I have never hit a patient, but I sure felt like slapping her......hard. I left the charge RN to deal with her as my pager had gone off about 7 times during this little scene and now I was behind.

I waited a good 30 minutes for everyone to clear out and asked the charge nurse if she had to do anything else for the patient. She says no and I went in to see her. I was still mad. How dare she do something so freaking stupid! She was the least "sick" patient I had to take care of and how dare she waste our time, especially on a night like tonight.

I opened the door and was bombarded by apologies.

So I asked again,"What were you thinking?"

"I was in pain", she says.

"I just offered you two different kinds of pain meds 20 minutes before they called a code on you and you said you were not in any pain. You didn't even call to tell me you suddenly went into pain"

"I know. I am stupid"

"Well I won't argue with you there".

SO the story goes. She was going to get up and go to the bathroom. She dropped her pen on the floor and bent down to pick it up. She saw an orange syringe underneath the head of the bed, right beside the wall and had her husband get it. She took it to the bathroom and gave herself some. She admitted to having no idea what it was. She said she thought it was some kind of pain medicine. Her husband said she came out of the bathroom looking weird and made some strange noise, then dropped to the floor in a fetal position. He thought she was joking at first. Then he yelled outside the room for help. Another nurse, Jon was the only one down that hall at the time and he ran in and weight-lifted her onto the bed and called the code. Jon said he had no idea what was going on, but knew she was not breathing.

What an idiot. She had no prior drug history, no psych history; I could find no reason for what could have possessed her to shoot up with some foreign substance in a syringe she found on the floor.

The charge nurse wrote it up. All we could think is that when she was brought to the room the night before from recovery, someone lost a syringe. Seems like they would have known it was missing. Who knows.......

The patient was fine the rest of the night. Didn't even ask for pain meds and was very apologetic.

Whatever.