I am a relief charge nurse at Arrow Springs, last week our department wanted to admit a 25 year old man for whatever reason was having orthostatic hypotension and we were drawing blanks here as to what was causing his hypotension. The patient has been around several family members who were having troubles with gastroenteritis and it was felt the patient had the same.
I spoke with the house supervisor and she initially felt comfortable sending the patient to remote tele, but she wanted me to get a feeling from the nurse taking report how comfortable she felt about the patient. Jenny Rawlings was the nurse and she said she was comfortable with taking the patient maybe based upon her experience, she sounded experienced but she has some concerns about the significant orthostasis with simply putting pillows under his head. I agreed with Jen about maybe the patient going to full telemetry and made arrangements for that.
During our report, Jen asked about a CT scan of his abdomen and like a big dumb ER nurse of 16 years I though to myself, why would I scan his abdomen he didn’t hurt his abdomen, get run over by a truck, or fall off a ladder so I told her no and even asked the MD here in the ER if we needed to scan his belly and he said his abdomen was completely benign….. well it wasn’t. The kid had a non-traumatic spontaneous rupture of his spleen and could have very easily bled to death and Jenny nailed it on the head. I spoke with Jenny already because I felt she deserved to hear that she was RIGHT and we were WRONG, so the ER is not always right like we always think we are.
God forbid anyone of my family finds their way into the hospital but I would feel completely safe knowing that Jen is monitoring their condition. It is this kind of nursing that makes me feel proud that I work for TriHealth.