When I returned to work things had taken a turn for the worst during the day shift. They had lost 4 patients. 1 of these patients was my 20 year old and 2 other patients were in their early 40's. Talking to the nurse that I gave a report to in the morning about the 20 year old, he said they coded him (CPR, drugs, defibrillator) for about 25 minutes. Since he was prone when he went into arrest they did back/side CPR. I have read about this and actually did some research but I have never had to do it myself. He said it was very ineffective and they eventually flipped him supine, but it was unlikely to get a pulse back anyway. From what I understand, he is the youngest to die on my floor since the crisis began.
I had three patients, two were vented and sedated and the other was the gal I had the night before that was self proning. She continued to do well with proning treatment and we are hopefully going to downgrade her to another floor today. The other two patients were both getting the antibody plasma and the new drug remdesivir. Hopefully We can see improvements with these patients with these newer drug therapies. I am still afraid it's too late in the process for these medications to work.
During my shift we ended up having two more people on the floor die. This made a total of 6 people in 24 hours. It was the most people in a 24 hour period on the floor in a couple weeks. I saw Utah had 6 die in the state today. Which is very sad, but for perspective 6 died on my floor alone.
Another travel nurse from Texas gave me a surgical hat. It was very nice of her because I am tired of making my own hats out of paper.