Another bad night

Man, last night was one of the worst. Let's start with the easy patients. The first lady, very sweet little lady really, decided at 2am that she needed to get up and "take care of some things." The problem with this is that she is a high risk for falling and breaking her hip. This lady was very very confused. I just didn't have time to babysit her because down the hall I had a patient just get back from the OR. He was stable, but his wound was bleeding like a mofo. That had to be dealt with ASAP. In another room, I had a patient with alzheimers and severe dementia. He had no idea what was going on and he was climbing all over his bed. He's another one that's at risk for hurting himself. These three patients would keep anybody busy all night long. Then, to top it all off, I had another guy that was going downhill very fast. Starting at about 2:30am, he was having more and more problems breathing and by 5am, we had the doctor up there calling a code blue. He wasn't breathing, no pulse, completely unresponsive. Basically dead. We brought him back, but then when I called the family, they said to stop. Don't bother doing that again. Its difficult to ask the family what they want in situations like this. As if they didn't have enough on their minds. The guy is doing somewhat okay now, but his breathing still sucks and I don't know how long he'll last. I'm dreading going back to work tonight.