A Bad Reputation September 14, 2008
Posted by keepbreathing in death, humor, respiratory therapists, respiratory therapy, work.trackback
Man, a lot of my patients have been dying lately. It seems like every shift I work, at least one of the people under my watch either crumps, codes or dies outright. It’s gotten bad: nurses jokingly shun me and other RTs jest that perhaps I should be assigned the patients who refuse to die.
But I didn’t realize how bad my reputation had gotten until this morning. I was standing in one of our RT offices sipping a cup of coffee when one of our RT students walked in. We hire RT students to do inventory and gopher work for us, and this one student has a reputation for being extremely quiet. Not so this morning. She walked into the office, flipped me a sweet smile, and then said…
“So…killed any of your patients yet today?”
You know it’s bad when even the students know. Maybe I’ll start putting notches in my stethoscope every time someone goes on my shift…if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!
I went through a stint of time where I worked agency. Did a lot of night shifts at one place. I loved the hospital and the staff liked me – no problems there. But I had the same problem you’re discribing. They weren’t usually my patients, for some reason, but I just had to be on the shift. One usually, but sometimes two or three. It got to where they’d shift me in post-op open heart or ICU just to see if they could improve the odds there.
I came in to report one night and the staff had made me a new badge for my lab coat. It was a caduceus made out of crossed cobras with bat wings.
At least they didn’t list me on the shift assignment sheet as ‘The Angel of Death’.
I had six patients die on me last month in the PICU. After the fourth one, the other residents were calling me the Grim Reaper. And they weren’t kidding.
I’m thinking of dressing up as it for Halloween…whaddya think?
you say: “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!”
I say: This may be one of the places where that phrase is not appropriate… unless you want to end up in the ER on 1:1 suicide watch.
That’s why they call me “Blackcloud”. Where I charge, chaos follows.
[...] 17, 2008 Posted by keepbreathing in Uncategorized. trackback Remember the other day, when I was telling you that all of my patients have been dying [...]
Have you heard the name Efrin Saldivar? Look it up if you haven’t and then be quite. This stuff can give you a bad name.
It is just the random variation of the patients. This is the reason that medical people, who should know better, believe that the ED is busier when there is a full moon, or are afraid of using the words “Quiet” or “Slow.” There is very little understanding of statistical variation and a need to attribute causes, where no cause exists.
Reversion to the mean is the term for when a short term aberration in statistics returns to the normal, more even distribution of codes among your coworkers.
OTOH, maybe you could provide bin Laden’s next dialysis treatment.