Code: Insanity

I'm am currently doing my last clinical rotation of nursing school! This one is called Senior Practicum or Capstone, and it's different than the others because we actually had a say in where we went and what unit we have our clinicals on. I got mine at Platte Valley Medical Center (where I already work) on the 3rd floor. I'm splitting my hours between the Special Care Nursery (aka the NICU) and Labor & Delivery. It's awesome taking care of little babies and moms all day :) Usually...

Thursday was a little different. It was BUSY. Lots of patients. 1 French-speaking only mom on her 3rd baby who was going to go unmedicated, 1 Spanish-speaking only madre having her 2nd baby, 1 really cute first time mom, and 1 really cute mom having her second baby. The last one was specifically my patient, but I did help out with all the others. She was awesome... until all hell broke loose! (Read on, you will see why there are no pictures for this post... I'm sparing you all the gory details).

My patient was awesome, and lots of fun, even in labor. Yes, seriously. She was. Her husband was funny. Her labor was less than 6 hours and she got the baby out in one contraction. Seriously. Since her hubby was extremely squeamish and didn't want anything to do with what was going on down there, I got to cut the cord. The doctor called it a "cheap thrill," but I actually thought it was cool. The baby was a girl, and she was cute! The parents hadn't found out the sex before the baby was born, so it was a big surprise. Since her mom hadn't pushed forever, she wasn't all squished either. So we checked the baby out, took vitals, and checked the fundus blah, blah blah every 10-15 minutes for a while. This time was different. I was going to take vital signs on the baby while the nurse I was working with checked the mom. I had the baby on the warmer and was unwrapping her. Jennifer (the nurse) called me over and had me check out the mom. She had been completely fine and exactly where she should have been until that point. Well, this time she was hemorrhaging. For any of my nursing school friends reading this, do you remember in lab when there was red jello spread all over the bed to simulate a hemorrhage and clots? Yeah, it was just like that, except it wasn't jello...

That was when everything went nuts. I was running all over the place grabbing stuff for everyone else. I now know where all the emergency equipment is on that floor... They called a Code White, which is the code for postpartum hemorrhage, but is really the code for insanity. There were so many people in that room. A nursery nurse grabbed the baby, someone started a second IV line, we started dumping fluids into the mom, threw oxygen on her, brought in an ultrasound machine to check her uterus... It was completely nuts. The dad ran out of them room to avoid all the blood, and the grandma (the mom's mom) just started crying and wouldn't move. Luckily the mom was ok. She was awake and talking the whole time actually. She giggled during fundal checks and told us we were  tickling her, until her epidural wore off anyways. We think her bladder had just filled up after we took the catheter out so she could push (her bladder filled in all of about 20 minutes). Yikes. We got my patient taken care of, and Jen and I cleaned everything up (this all happened in the middle of lunch, mind you). So we went back out to chart on what had happened and finish lunch.

Just about then, another nurse called for help on her patient, which was the Spanish-speaking only mom. She was bleeding too! So we kind of went through the same thing and she had lost enough blood to call another Code White! This is just crazy because they're actually pretty rare, so to have 2 in one day, especially in a small hospital, is almost unheard of. This poor lady was worse off than my patient, and the doctor had to do bimanual compression on her (which involves one hand on the outside and one on the inside to compress the uterus...) It was not pretty. She ended up being all right too, and didn't need surgery or anything the last I heard. Thank goodness, but that day was seriously insane! It took me 3 hours to eat my little lunch.

Welcome to nursing :)

And, just for the record, the mom who was going natural ended up getting an epidural right before 7 pm, when I left... She was so pooped from fighting the pain and yelling/chanting during every contraction that her labor wouldn't progress any more until she stopped fighting it and let her body take over. Personally, I'm still in for the water birth...