"Easy" Money

Night shifts at the hospital are usually easy money. My patients often sleep for at least 6 hours of the shift giving me plenty of time to read and knit dishcloths for my kitchen.

This is what I had in mind, at least when I agreed to go into work at 11:00pm last night. My shifts are usually from  0700-1900 or from 1900-0700 so an eight hour shift sounded easy peasy to me. I didn't have a meeting until 12pm the next day so I would have a couple hours to sleep before needing to wake up and go.

I arrived at the hospital to find a little old man dressed in the hallway. He said he was going home, but I convinced him to take a walk with me around the hospital. We looped around the ward for a bit and then I persuaded him to go to bed as it was after midnight.

He was in bed for all of five minutes before my sweet little old man transformed into ... something else.

We eventually decided to walk to the TV room because he was disrupting the other three patients he shared a room with. We were there for all of ten minutes before one of the less friendly nurses told him he needed to go to bed. By the time my patient was back in his room he was not impressed. He was beyond not impressed. He started taking off his telemetry pack (heart monitor) and shouting in German. I asked the nursing student to get the charge nurse because I was not excited about where things were heading. I stepped into his room and was conscious about maintaining my distance, but I had to make sure that everyone in the room was safe.

We had thankfully just had self-defense/code white-ish training in class because my patient started getting aggressive and threatening. I was barely inside the door when my patient came at me swinging his telemetry pack. It smoked the wall beside me and broke.

I'm not going to lie. I may have been a little uncomfortable at this point. Maybe even scared. Yes, I had just been taught how to protect myself in this situation (you know, hands up, stable posture, ready to bolt), but we weren't taught what to do when a weapon was involved!

My patient thankfully stayed focused on me as he followed me outside while I slowly backed away towards the nursing station (I was worried he would attack his roommates). He kept swinging and yelling and the nurses called the code white. I continued backing up until I was at the nurses station where I was met by security guards and the code white team.

They were with the patient for an hour trying to de-escalate the situation. He even tried to deck the head of the code white team who tried to give him an injection.

One of the security guards stayed with him until the medication kicked in. That took an hour and a half. That was an hour and a half that I just sat in the nursing station doing whatever I could to help out on the floor.

After that I returned to the bedside, he remained sleeping for 15 minutes. His snoring neighbor woke him up and he decided he was not going to stay in bed anymore. He was not aggressive, but he was adamant about not remaining in his room so I timidly escorted him into the hall. I was a little uncomfortable and wary because I didn't want to make him angry. I hope that didn't show because I didn't want him to think he could get away with whatever he wanted. As we walked toward the TV room he tried to enter the other patient's rooms. I tried to redirect him, but he started getting frustrated with me. The charge nurse saw him getting upset so she called security to come sit with him again.

As soon as the security guards showed up he returned to being the sweet old man he was in the beginning. So, the security guard sat with him until 5am when he finally fell asleep and then I returned to my post at the bedside.

All-in-all it was a rather eventful night.