Nursing Blog with Expert Insights

They say love is blind. Grief is just an expression of love, and it can be just as blind. When people grieve, there are many ways it can...

Understanding Endocarditis and Its Challenges On a cardiac unit, I see all types of heart and vascular diseases. Many of them appear in the same "type" of patient. Peripheral vascular disease usually affects diabetics or smokers. Coronary artery disease often shows up in people who are a bit heavier than is healthy. And then there's endocarditis. This condition is often found in young people with a history of IV drug use. Endocarditis, an inflammation of heart tissue, is freq

This story is special to me because it was one of the times I had the opportunity to help family through a patient's passing. Most of the time, family isn't around at night. So if someone passes on my shift, pretty often the family isn't there. Sometimes at work we joke about how things tend to unravel or descend into chaos at shift change. Whether it's a rapid response, a code, multiple admissions, or suddenly every patient needs something, it seems like shift change is ofte

This is actually a continuation of Larry's story from my previous post,"The night I was Shelley." I made it a separate post because if I included this part, I wouldn't be able to tag the first one as humorous. Unfortunately, his story ultimately has a sad ending that I struggled with for a little bit. I took care of Larry at least 5 times and grew quite fond of him. He was very kind and patient, very grandfatherly. I've lost all of my grandparents by now, so feeling the grand

As I mentioned in my "About" section of the Nurse's Refuge website, there was a particularly troubling code at work lately that took me almost a week to process. I remember feeling angry and sad about it, while also feeling ashamed about the fact it was troubling me days later. After all, I've been a nurse for over 5 years now. I've been in enough codes by now to be a little more used to it, right? And honestly, usually they don't hang around in my head for days. But this one

Sometimes patients, both confused and oriented patients, think we do things just for the heck of it. Or for money, or for control, or for power, or even, according to some, it's straight up that we don't know what we're doing and we're idiots. Usually it's confused patients making these claims, but I see oriented patients making these claims too. However, this story was a confused patient. Believe it or not, we do tend to do medical interventions for a reason... In this case

Nursing isn't just about saving or improving lives. Sometimes it's also about helping patients die with dignity. So many times, I've seen patients decline to the point they are mentally gone and physically suffering, but their legal decision-makers can't accept death as an outcome. They refuse hospice and push for painful, risky interventions and surgeries. Don't get me wrong. I understand the pain of losing a loved one. I know it's hard to let someone you love go, and it of

This is a sad one. It happened quite a while ago, maybe a couple years. I had a patient who had some kind of skin and tissue disease where large ulcers appeared all over and just grew in size and couldn't be stopped. Sort of like necrotizing fasciitis, but widespread in random spots. I don't remember what it was called. He was a bilateral amputee with an extremely poor prognosis. He'd been in the hospital for a long, long time trying different therapies and surgeries until al

It was day shift, early in my career as a nurse, January 2020. I was still a code blue virgin, hadn't even witnessed one yet. I was on our sister unit across the hall talking to someone about my timecard. Suddenly, it happened. My work phone gave off that chilling code blue ring that alarms on the whole unit when someone presses the code blue button on the wall. I looked at my phone. "CODE BLUE, RM 357". Of course I was all the way across the hall... So I went off running. Mo