About

Hello world! My name is Bella, and I'm a cardiac nurse of 5 years. I've been on the same unit my whole career, a cardiac telemetry unit in a major city hospital in the US. Considered a progressive care unit, I see relatively stable patients most shifts, but crashing patients are not uncommon. Since it is a cardiac unit, the patient population tends to be a little more on the geriatric side, but I often have young patients, too. We also get many vascular disease patients on our unit. Heart failure, acute coronary syndrome, coronary artery disease, and peripheral artery disease are probably the most frequent primary diagnoses we get, but I see many other things as well. Sometimes, when the hospital is bursting at the seams, we get totally unrelated conditions like lung disease or even just musculoskeletal trauma. One thing is for sure though: There's never a shortage of stories to tell! I used to do a lot of creative writing when I was younger and always dreamed of writing a fiction book, but recently I came to a new realization. My uncle texted me one day saying, “I still hope you'll use your writing skills to do some sort of book or online blog or something about your medical experiences.” At first, I didn't think much of it. But then, something happened.

 

A couple weeks ago, one of our patients coded. It was brutal and clearly a loss from the start, but we did what we could to revive him. Unfortunately, we could not, and the doctor called his time of death after 15 minutes of CPR. I did 3 rounds of CPR myself, breaking several of the poor man's rib bones, and despite the fact I've been in plenty of codes before, for some reason this one wasn't sitting well with me. I struggled with it for days, replaying the whole code over and over in my head. I felt a little ashamed of myself for being so upset by it for so long. It made me feel weak, like everyone else had already moved on except me. I thought that, since I have a decent amount of experience, it shouldn't be bothering me this much. Then it clicked. This was the first code in years that I had participated in that did not achieve ROSC (return of spontaneous circulation). Usually, we get a pulse back and send the patient to ICU where sometimes they recover and sometimes they end up passing away anyways. But it had been years since the last time I was in a code where the patient stayed dead. That's why it was weighing on me so heavily.

 

I posted about my experience on Reddit (vaguely to respect HIPAA) and found that writing about it helped me process it and move on. It was then that I realized writing about my experiences is the best way for me to process them, and I remembered my uncle's suggestion. So, I decided to try starting a blog. And who knows? I'm always looking for my next side hustle. Maybe I'll expand this to include resources for new nurses or health education or something.

 

Please be polite and appropriate in any replies. My posts are meant for entertainment and informational purposes and will never share patient information. Names in stories are pseudonyms and not actual patient names. Thanks for visiting, and I hope you enjoy the content!

 

- Bella, RN