To erase the hurt and fears

2003-03-16 - 9:03 p.m.

Hey, it's after my bedtime and I'm just now getting started. What can I say, it's Stretch's fault. I was answering an e-mail he wrote to me. I spent over an hour on it. I ended up with a short little paragraph that basically only said the essentials. Nothing at all about what I've been thinking recently. I don't know if I want to involve him in that.

This morning I saved someone's life before 7:30am. How many other people can claim that, eh? Heh. See, maybe it's worthwhile keeping me around after all. Ok, I'm not saying that had I not gone to work this guy would've died, probably somebody else would've caught the mistake. But it might've gone overlooked a lot longer and real damage might've been done. What happened, you ask? A guy in one of the ICU's was on about 8 different drips. Two of these were vecuronium and vasopressin. When his vasopressin drip ran out at 5:30 this morning the nurse accidently grabbed a spare vecuronium drip to hang in it's place. The vec was supposed to be running at 6cc/hr and the vasopressin at 12cc/hr. So instead this guy had one vec drip running at 6 and another running at 12 and no vasopressin. Triple the dose of vec and no pressure support. Yikes. I found it at 7:20 and got it fixed right away.