I managed to find myself as the first physician present in a code situation today.
Talk about terrifying.
The nurses were performing chest compressions and giving bagged breaths for a patient this morning by the time I walked into the room.
I simply stood at the foot of the bed with a deer in headlights look and asked, “What’s going on?”
After an initial smart-assed response of, “Well, he’s not breathing”, I managed to get a bit of an event progression from the nurse who was already drawing up some epinephrine into a syringe.
Lucky for me…and the patient…a few more white coats with more experience arrived just as the nurse was finishing the history. I was off the hook for “leading” the code–and the patient was better off for it.
Of course, I broke the number one rule of code situations…
I forgot to take my own pulse.
What a morning.
*Editorial Note: On Friday I carried the code pager for the day, and it did go off. I was half way across the hospital and by the time I got there the code was finished. Apparently the patient was a DNR–or some such. As such I don’t count that as the first code of my career.
First to a code…bad bad bad.
I delivered a baby with gastroschisis. (Apparently the surrounding area where I am has an unnaturally high rate of it). It was disturbingly weird.
It was unavoidable, I was right across the hall when the Code Blue came over the intercom. There was no place to hide.
Oh, and babies are icky.
I’ve been seen a code where no doctors responded. It was late at night and the internal med team was supposed to take the calls since our surgery residents have home call. Apparently the resident was in the library, headphones on, sleeping. He almost got fired in front of everybody the next morning. Bad, bad, bad.
Geeze. That is very scary. At what point do they teach you how to respond to a code? I am a fourth year medical student – do they teach you that when you get certified in advanced life support?
peanut
My intern year I figured this out. When arriving first to a code 1) identify yourself (I’m the intern on the code team) 2) assign someone to check pulse/do compressions 3) assign someone to attach the defib leads. This will buy you enough time to either think about what comes next, or until your resident arrives.
way too many hours, my friend.