18.04.09
Bad end of week
Friday started badly after a night of bad sleep interrupted by my house alarm randomly going off at 3am and then followed by me having a dream in which my toenails got manky (if you’re Clurb then “mankier”) and I pulled them off. Great.
So to work early and then a full diary. Was a little tired throughout the day but people were the same as always.
Until the last patient. And not even my patient.
I was at the PC doing some paperwork and the locum physio we have asked me if I could fetch her patient a glass of water. I disappeared off to get one. On my return I see a worried looking locum saying “my patient’s collapsed”.
Oh great.
Went into the cubicle to see the patient on her side on the treatment couch, eyes closed but breathing.
Pulse taken and normal. BP taken and normal. Patient responsive to questions but “unable” to open her eyes.
So emergency practitioner called (that’s not just jargon, he was a specialist nurse not a paramedic). He re-checked everything I’d checked as well as blood sugar (also normal). Cue lots of talking and waiting and talking.
Some frankly bizarre responses from the patient led him to call an ambulance. And now me and the locum could finally get to write up our experiences for the inevitable “incident form” on Monday.
When the ambulance man showed up he asked the locum for some more details about what happened and then managed to upset her horribly by saying “It’s all your fault then” (assumedly in jest). Really a bad idea as she was worried that she’d done something to prompt this incident.
So after doing the notes and sorting the room out I then had to spend a good half hour trying to talk through the incident with the locum and coming to the conclusion that she’d done nothing wrong. Not sure she thinks of it in that way yet though.
Will have to chat to the boss first thing on Monday now and it’s not as if there’s lots of available time for me on Monday.
The whole incident did bring back bad memories for me. When I was a little physio I was with a patient who’d just had cardiac surgery. My role at the point in rehab was to get her out of bed and walking again.
All the notes were clear that she could get up and move. I got her up and walked about 5m with her. When getting back to the bed she went a little confused and couldn’t follow instructions. So I sort of pushed her onto the bed and then plugged her into the monitoring system. Nothing horribly out of place. Asked her some questions – no response. Called a nurse. After a few mins we concluded she’d had a stroke (confirmed later).
My supervisor found me an hour later (probably in the loo) worrying that I’d been the cause of this. It took her an hour or so going through the notes and my treatments with me before concluding that I’d done nothing wrong; it was just “one of those things”.
That patient died a day later.
I think the current patient isn’t anywhere near as serious as that was but it’s still freaky when a patient you’ve touched goes “wrong”. Not good at all.