Two days
past and Neil was talking more but he was in a lot of pain so continued with
the morphine. I came in early in the
morning as they were going to have him sit up at the side of the bed and stand
if he was up to it. He tried, but was so
weak and quickly became dizzy and we had to sit him back down. They still had a couple of IV’s, oxygen, and monitors
attached to him so he definitely was not going anywhere by himself.
The next
morning when I came in, to my surprise, he was being given a blood
transfusion. When I asked him why, he
said he did not know, just they said he needed it. As I stated in an earlier post, I am a
Licensed Practical Nurse. I noticed as
soon as I walked in that the transfusion was not dripping properly and there
was about 18 inches of saline in the tube where the blood should of been. At least it was not air. I asked Neil if I could look at his arm where
the IV was inserted. As soon as I saw it
and felt it I knew the IV needle was not in the vein. This means the blood was going directly into
his arm. He said he wondered why his arm
was hurting so bad. I called for the
nurse. I told her what was happening but
she told me it was all fine. I stressed
a little louder that it was not fine and to go get someone to fix this. I told her they had to remove the IV.
The Charge
nurse came to the room and before I could say anything she glanced up at the
transfusion and said, “Oh, that’s not right.
Let me fix this first then I will look at your arm.” She got the transfusion working correctly,
then looked at his arm and said, “This is definitely not going into the vein,
we have to remove it.” Hmmm, her statements
sounded familiar, I say with sarcasm.
That night the
evening nurse came by and said he wanted to get Neil up to try to walk again. Neil definitely needed two people with him to
get up so I assisted. He said it felt so
good to be up off of his back, but he could not tolerate it for long. He was standing, and taking a few
tiny steps. The nurse said that Neil seemed
unsteady and asked if he felt light headed.
Neil said no. It took a while but
he managed to walk about four feet.
Again, the nurse said that Neil seemed unsteady so we should turn around
and head back to the bed. I pride myself
on my nursing observation skills and told his nurse that he is not unsteady on
his feet but if he was to watch his feet and legs while he was walking he would
see that when Neil put weight on his left leg, it was in fact giving out on
him. We need to get him onto the bed
quickly I said before he goes down onto the floor. I did not know why he had no strength in the
left leg but I was worried that if the weakness carried over to the right leg,
we would be in trouble. So we tucked him
back into bed.
A couple of
hours later I paged the nurse to come back to the room. I explained to him that something was
wrong. I think it’s the morphine I told
him. “No..no..no.. he said. It’s all ok.”
“I know my husband,” I said, and it is not normal for him to be talking and
mid-sentence just stop and stare off into space, his eyes rolling up into his
head and then raise his hand into the air and with his index finger start
counting something. When I tried to
talk to him and pull his hand down, he unknowingly resisted me. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” that useless nurse
said, but I will make a note in the chart for the doctor to see in the morning.” Once again, it turned out I was right. He was in fact having a reaction to the
Morphine and was taken off of it asap and put on a different pain medication. Don’t get me wrong there are a lot of really
good nurses out there, just unfortunately we had a few incompetent ones.
My days at
the hospital were long. I felt like I
couldn’t leave his side. My poor husband
was only able to have water on his lips or tongue using the sponge sticks they gave
him. He was so thirsty and hungry but no
food was allowed either. At 10:00 pm just as I was getting ready to
leave for the night, the nurse came in and said they were moving Neil to
another room as they needed this room for someone else. Good-bye private room. So I stuck around until the move was made and
he was settled and sleeping at around 11:30 pm, then I headed home. That bed never felt so good…
I woke to
the phone ringing at 6:30 am. It was the
Charge nurse on Neil’s unit calling to tell me that they had to call a code 66 on
Neil at 6:00 am. Out of a dead sleep I abruptly
came to life and shouted, “You had to call a code on him?! A code what? 66? What is a code 66?” I said. My brain heard the word code and of course
filled in the ending of that sentence with the word, blue, but I suddenly
realized she said code 66? I had never
heard of this before. She explained that
it means he was non-responsive. They use
this code when a situation occurs that gives them cause to believe the patient might go into a
code blue, so this is a preventative procedure in hopes of diverting a code
blue. I flew out of bed, grabbed my
clothes, purse, and car keys and was out the door in less than 5 minutes. Oh my God, we had made it through the surgery
and his being resuscitated to possibly lose him now? I could not believe this was happening. I got to the hospital and ran to his
unit. He was surrounded by about eight
specialty team members. His speech was
slurred, and he had absolutely no movement or feeling in his entire left
side. “A stroke? Has he had a stroke?” I
asked with tears streaming down my face.
There’s more….see ya tomorrow...Tori
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