Creating my own reality

This is post is going to be part of the "healing process" for me to come to terms with the unethical death of my patient. The professor I confided in said it would be good for me to journal/blog what I would have done if I were the nurse, kind of as a way to create my own reality so that I use this experience to mold myself into the kind of nurse I want to be.

What really happened:

The professor I was working with was in charge of 2 patients; the one was discharged and my patient was rather extensive. Granted, he was critically ill. There's no doubt about that; it was the way that my professor handled it.

She has a negative attitude and thinks almost everyone that is really ill is bound to die in the hospital. It's as if she has no belief in positive outcomes whatsoever. Her bedside manner is atrocious. I spent some of the morning assessing my patient. His skin was mottled from poor circulation and his lungs were full of blood; his blood pressure was fluctuaing a lot. He was sick, very sick. All my professor did was stand by his bedside and chart, all the while saying, "He's just going to die. He probably won't even make it through the weekend." She would walk out of the room talking to whoever would listen, "His wife really needs to get over it. He's not going to get better. He needs to be a DNR (do not recusitate)". If you know anything about the dying process, then you'll know that a person's hearing is the last sense they lose. That's why people talk to their dying loved one; because they can hear you. My patient could hear my professor saying he was going to die. This is aweful nursing care. I felt tears sting the back of my eyes every time she said that at his bedside. I wanted so badly to yell at her to stop it, but she isn't the kind of person you can stand up to.

Later, my professor made an inappropriate phone call to the patient's wife, "Ma'am you know your husband is really sick. If he codes, I am going to have to do things to his chest to bring him back, and there's no guarantee that will happen. Is that really what you want to happen to him?" She said this in a very condoning and accusatory tone. The wife never gave her a straight answer, because she didn't want to change his code status. After she got off the phone, my professor danced around the unit, "I planted a seed to his wife. I'm going to talk to the doctor later and see if we can get the ball rolling."

His wife was not ready to let him go. They just bought their dream house together in a different state and were moving soon. They had been married for 45 years. They were still young. There was still hope for him.

The doctor arrived later in the morning. My professor cornered him, literally. She told him that he needed to make the wife change the code status to a DNR (the doctor cannot legally do that), and the patient needed to be taken off the ventilator. I don't know why. It was like she couldn't have him dead soon enough. My mind was spinning all the while this was happening. I was in such shock, I couldn't even advocate for the patient. I'm just a student anyway.

The doctor said he wanted to keep trying, so to keep pushing the vasopressins and fluids and keep his blood pressure stable. My professor got mad. She said to the doctor and her fellow staff, "If he codes, I will work on him, but very slowly. I will make sure he doesn't come back".

I need a break. More to blog later.