Nurse Days

Wednesday, February 9, 2000

I spent today at the family clinic. I was assigned to Jody, an RN. It was a pretty slow day (Jody even said it's hardly ever this slow), until around 1330. We grabbed the chart of the next person to be seen--a 14-year-old male who was complaining of shakiness and pallor. We brought him back, weighed him and took his vitals, and put him in the last room on the left. He was hyperventilating, extremely pale and shaky. The doctor looked him over and said he appeared to be fine. They decided to leave him to rest in the room until he started to feel better.

Upon leaving the room, Jody informed me that she was very familiar with this boy. He had been injured in a football accident back in November in which he had sustained a subdural hematoma and a badly sprained knee. He was taken to Salt Lake and subjected to all the usual tests (MRI, head CT, etc.), but nothing else was found to be wrong with him.

Around 1400 Jody and I went in to check on him. Shortly after entering the room he began to shake. He closed his eyes and appeared to be in quite a lot of pain. He again started to hyperventilate, stated he couldn't feel his face and that his legs were tingling. The situation progressively got worse, and when Jody peeled his eyelids back to look at his eyes one was looking to the far left while the other looked up. The pupils were unequally dilated.

I went to get the doctor, who said he thought the boy was seizing. I stood by him so he wouldn't fall off the bed, and repeated over and over that he needed to slow his breathing down. "Slow and relaxed. Slow and relaxed," I kept saying. The seizure lasted about 5 minutes, and afterward we stayed with him while he rested.

About 20 minutes later he started seizing again, only this time it was much worse and lasted longer. The ambulance was called and the fire department arrived. An IV was started and Dilantin administered to stop the seizures. He was taken to the hospital soon after.

What really bothered me about this whole thing is that no tests were done, no blood was drawn, no assessment of any kind was performed, and the boy was allowed to sit in a tiny room for nearly two hours--seizing--before someone called the ambulance. His mother was in tears, the kid was in obvious pain, and yet no pain medication was administered (he repeatedly complained of pain the entire time he was there). It was like nothing was done to help this boy or even try to find out what could be wrong with him. I was pretty disappointed.

If he'd been my child I would have gone through the roof. This is a 14-year-old young man (and we all know how macho they try to be) crying...tears streaming down his cheeks as he moaned, "My head hurts. My leg hurts," yet nothing was done to relieve his pain.

How sad.