Nursing Blog with Expert Insights

I work on a unit that has a lot of so-called "frequent flyers". That is, patients that return multiple times because of relapses in their disease. Mostly, this is vascular and heart failure patients. I see quite a few patients who are current smokers that come in with peripheral vascular disease in unrelenting agony that end up getting their leg amputated, yet they refuse to stop smoking and end up returning later for the other leg. In the case of heart failure, patients slac

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

I have always referred to this event as "my big code", and I don't think I'll ever forget it. Several years ago, on night shift, I was charting at the nurse's station. It had been a quiet night. I have a habit of sometimes just staring at our telemetry monitors up front when I'm bored. I like to glance at each patient's heart rhythm and try to interpret it. I have caught abnormal things numerous times by doing this, and this night was no different. I glanced over at the monit