Friday, May 2, 2008

Public Service Announcement: Healthcare Edition

If you are doing really good CPR, and your compressions look like V-Tach on the monitor, and your patient has a pacemaker/defibrillator, you may just get shocked.

And it will hurt.

And your co-workers will laugh at you.

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

OWW!

kmsw said...

let me just clean the coffee off the screen. . .

That'll teach you. hehehehe

Anonymous said...

sounds painful!

EE said...

HAHA

Anonymous said...

That's why we try to get the cops to do CPR
HEHEHE

Tyro said...

Now that's strong work! Well done. I suppose you were getting two tasks done at once; defibrillating without pausing CPR at all.

Anonymous said...

lol. You almost made me snort coffee in starbucks.

Anonymous said...

Truly sorry I missed it :)
Almost happened to me once, but we had just stopped compressions to charge, when his defibrillator fired. Then we had to figure out how to uncharge ours.
Can we call you sparky now?

Anonymous said...

whitecap nurse says:
Yikes! I never thought of that.

Tex said...

Happened to me.
Doesn't hurt, feels like a static shock, you know, someone touching you after shuffling on carpet.
First time scared the shit out of me, afterwards, a couple of others in the room took turns at CPR for the 'shock' value.
BTW, pt made it but died the next day.

Rogue Medic said...

Didn't the patient yell "CLEAR?"

tex,

"pt made it but died the next day."

For "made it," you have a very glass half full approach. Or was the patient struck by a bus after discharge? :-)

My Own Woman said...

Now THAT was the funniest thing I've read today

Mom In Scrubs said...

I assume you're talking about an internal defibrallator? If so you couldn't really yell clear 'cause you can't tell it's charging.

We shocked people via their defibs all the time when we implanted them and no one ever "cleared." I never felt it once?

Maybe I'm just lucky.

I HAVE seen more than one person fail to clear on an external defib. POW!! Now you have another patient.

Rogue Medic said...

And if the patient is truly a candidate for CPR, the patient should not be capable of yelling clear.

I thought the silliness of my comment was obvious. :-)

cwjsmama said...

I wish I would have read this post sooner. It would have warned me of things to come :)

Unknown said...

I don't know what had me laughing more, this post, the fibromyalgia day post or Rogue and his why didn't the patient yell clear comment. I love it. Sarcasm is always appreciated.