Karlee Campos
December 2021
Karlee
Campos
,
BSN, RN
Telemetry
Redlands Community Hospital
Redlands
,
CA
United States

 

 

 

The significance of Karlee’s excellent critical thinking skills and quick response however eliminated the mystery of why this patient coded.
Karlee's critical thinking and nursing excellence helped to save a life yesterday. She had a COVID-positive patient who was on high flow oxygen and had recently been upgraded as a 3:1 because of how unstable he was. The patient reported to Karlee that his left arm was hurting and he attributed the pain to laying on it for too long. Karlee did not take this at face value as most people would've. This left arm pain paired with the patient's elevated heart rate that Karlee noted led her to obtain a 12 lead EKG. The EKG revealed that this was more than just arm pain. There was ST elevation noted in multiple leads indicating that the patient was having a significant myocardial infarction. This information was immediately relayed to the hospitalist and new orders to start a heparin drip and begin serial troponins were obtained. Within 30-45 minutes later, a code blue was called as the patient became unresponsive. The patient was subsequently resuscitated and taken to ICU. When a patient codes the cause is not always immediately known and can sometimes lead to the patient not being resuscitated. The significance of Karlee’s excellent critical thinking skills and quick response however eliminated the mystery of why this patient coded. Karlee’s keen foresight directed the code team as to what interventions would be best indicated for this patient and intensivist to have the cardiologist present during the code. As previously mentioned the patient was resuscitated successfully and was even responsive once in the ICU. Though still very unstable, Karlee’s initial response to this patient's left arm pain led to him getting another shot at life.