nothing good starts with the sentence "I don't like the way my mom is breathing". of course i would have to be the one to answer THAT call light...so i sent the nurse down to the room to see what was going on. she came out a few minutes later reporting that the patient was breathing at 8 a minute. not good, not good at all. she grabbed a vial of narcan to reverse the narcotics the patient had gotten earlier and i went to page the doctor. i looked everywhere for the patient's chart to find what resident was taking care of her and couldn't find it, so i just sent out a general page through the operator and went in to help. the nursing student got vitals, which showed that the patient's O2 sats were 78%. my coworker started pushing the narcan and i ran to grab a face mask and put the patient on 10 liters of oxygen. less than a minute later, the patient's sats came up to 100% and she woke up, thanks to the miracle of narcan. we titrated her O2 down to 3 liters and the nursing student stayed with her to take more vitals. it wasn't until this point than the doctor called back. apparently i paged the attending.
oops.
i could tell that things weren't going too well...the nurse was having to explain herself way too much and there appeared to be some lecturing going on. the attending told her that he didn't feel comfortable telling her that it was ok to give the narcan, and he needed to look up the policy. to which i say:
SERIOUSLY?
giving narcan is within our scope of practice. and when i see a patient who is struggling to breathe, turning white, and looking like she's headed to heaven i will give my narcan and have no remorse. feel free to look up the policy, because i'm pretty sure that it won't say that we should let little old ladies die while we wait for you to return my page.
five minutes later the attending called back. he looked it up and had decided that we were indeed allowed to give the narcan. gee thanks. oh, and YOU'RE WELCOME for helping your patient live to see another day.
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