Hyo Seon Park is a rock star when you take the time to watch her. I have worked several shifts with Hyo Seon and I am consistently impressed with her level of skill and her ongoing desire to learn even more during downtime so she can better serve her patients.
I had the pleasure of working with her again while she cared for a very critical 1:1 patient in ICU-4 with a very demanding family including all of the difficult personalities you can imagine. The patient had been in our ICU for weeks and unfortunately continued to decline. I was quite busy with my own two patients that day when around 11:00, which everyone knows is Hyo Seon's lunchtime, I realized that Hyo Seon had not said a word all day and was not talking about how she needed to go to lunch. “What's up Hyo Seon?” I asked. “My patient is going to code today” was her response. I asked her how she knew since his vitals appeared to be stable except for an O2 sat that was consistently just a little bit low. “Experience” was her response. We laughed at that and I asked her to explain a little which she did.
Essentially the patient was maxed out on any possible medication we could give him. His IV pump had multiple brains and multiple IV channels with a dizzying variety of medications running at all times. Hyo Seon is religious about taking lunch at 11:00 every day except that day. The timing just was not right. As the day progressed, any time one of her IV's beeped, she jumped up immediately to correct it as any slight deviation from his current line of treatment could cause him to unnecessarily spiral. Medications that needed to be stocked by the pharmacy were all requested well in advance and replenished immediately. Any detail that needed tending to with this patient Hyo Seon was on it.
Personally, I made sure nothing was put off with my patients because I knew we'd all be doing compressions at some point that day. We all dreaded and prepared for it in our own way. Around 4:30, sure enough, the patient's rhythm started to change. Hyo Seon immediately got on the phone to coordinate the family to come visit. Just before they arrived, we could not get a blood pressure on her patient anymore as his O2 sats continued to decline and his heart rate climbed higher. The family arrived and Hyo Seon quietly had the difficult conversation with them about what we were looking at and what they really wanted for him.
Anyone watching this patient decline over the last couple of days knew how dead set this family was on keeping him full code but that the code was inevitable. We all dreaded the moment when he coded because we knew it would be futile there was simply no more we could do for him. The family talked after their discussion and decided to make him DNR. The family stayed for about an hour, sent him their love, and left.
The patient's heart rate started to drop and we all watched him pass in a matter of minutes. It was a very peaceful setting free from hurriedly grabbing the crash cart that never seems to want to go in the proper direction multiple staff members rushing to gown up in PPE to do compressions in a hypoxic and sweaty state and the code blue alarm sounding the whole time.
From my standpoint, the thought of doing compressions on this poor man just to bring him right back to a state of suffering only to code repeatedly until he finally passed was just too much to think about. We have seen so much death in the past several months due to COVID and I'm not going to lie, it's been traumatic for all of us. After he passed, the family was called in one more time to pay their last respects. His room was free of all of the garbage that typically follows a code and he appeared to simply be resting comfortably. I am confident that Placentia Linda did absolutely everything we could for this patient and I told the family as much when I saw them after he passed. His son agreed with me.
I want to personally recognize Hyo Seon. Not just for always giving her absolute best as a Nurse, not just for always being a calm source of nursing knowledge readily available at the asking, not just for consistently pushing herself to learn more, and not just for being prepared with all of this patient's drips. Hyo Seon knew just when to call the family in so they could see she knew the right words to say to the family to gently guide them to a place of understanding and she saved that patient and the staff a whole lot of trauma with what we all knew would be an impossibly difficult code.
Hyo Seon is a tremendously exceptional nurse and I am so thankful to have the honor of working next to her.