I would like to mention a couple of positive things that have happened just in the couple weeks I have been here. The first thing is there have definitely been a decrease in admissions and Covid positive patients in the hospital. We are still running at full capacity and every patient on my floor is on a vent. There are still several rooms that have two vented patients in them, but when I first got here every room had two vented patients in them. The second thing is the response of medical staff to help has increased a large amount also. So between the two things the workload is so much more manageable. At first I always felt behind and felt like I couldn't work fast enough or hard enough to keep up with all the tasks that needed to be done. Now, I have another nurse to help with my task and I have fewer patients. This makes the treatment and care given a much higher quality type care. A lot of the initial chaos has subsided and there is a more organized and a more systematic approach to being able to deliver the necessary care for each patient.
Last night I had the same two patients that I had the night before. One of them, a 44 YOM had received a EEG earlier in the day and it was determined that he had little if any brain function left. He was tolerating the vent okay and he didn't need any blood pressure support, but he wasn't neurologically viable. I had mentioned before how the ICU's are triaged, well my unit is the unit that does everything possible to save someone, but once it is decided that we cant do anything else and therapies aren't working, the patients are transferred to another ICU where they slowly decrease the interventions being done to sustain life. So I had to transfer my patient to that unit.
My other patient was also a young 42 YOM. His vital signs were very stable throughout the shift. He was doing very well on the vent and he was on two low doses of pressors. Even though prognosis probably isn't great for him, I think he still has a chance at recovery.
Another patient on the floor, a gentleman in his early 50's had a very severe PE around 4am and he started to crash. He was stable all the way until this point. It was sad to see his decline because of the early hope that he would make a recovery. It has been crazy to see the different complications that arise because of the infection.