There is a bloody bite block on my wall, just above my desk.

It's in a biohazard bag, don't worry. It's pinned to my wall, just above my desk, so that I can see it every single morning and remember why the hell I got into this crazy business in the first place.We do a significant number of what are called transesophageal echocardiograms on our unit. Unlike transthoracic echoes, which take place when a tech holds an echo wand against your chest, a TEE takes place under moderate sedation, with a cardiologist feeding a long, skinny tube with an echo camera on the end of it down your throat.You can't do this without sedation. Try, and you'll end up with a retching, fighting patient and a poor-quality image. It's just flat impossible to ask an alert human to stand for having a two-foot length of something the thickness of my index finger inserted down his or her throat and manipulated. So we sedate. We're a critical-care unit; we're all trained to administer sedation and recover patients who've been sedated.Then, one day, Doctor deSade showed up. Dr. deS. was a new guy for us, from a different branch of cardiology, and nobody had worked with him before. The initial signs weren't promising: normally TEEs are done early in the morning, both because we want our patients to have time to get over their sedation and because they've not had anything to eat or drink since midnight. This dude promised to show up at around eleven, which is pushing it, but then didn't show up until past two o'clock.Kitty and I each had a patient undergoing a TEE that ...
Source: Head Nurse - Category: Nursing Authors: Source Type: blogs