Last night was a crazy shift in a lot of ways, but the guy whose heart decided to take a quick 6 second break takes the cake.
I walked into another nurse’s room because the patient’s IV was going off. Nothing exciting, just the usual pump that won’t shut up until someone deals with it. I’m fixing the IV minding my business, when the monitor suddenly reads asystole.
My first thought was artifact. Because it’s always artifact. But after a couple seconds the patient grabs his chest and goes, “what the hell? I feel really weird.”
Sir. That is not what I want to hear while your monitor is showing a flat line.
Then he specifies that he feels out of it after waking up from a “scary dream about a crash cart.” I replied, “nope, please don’t say that.”
After this brief little cardiac intermission, he casually says he feels totally fine and insists it was just a bad dream that woke him up. Meanwhile I’m standing there like… your heart just rage quit for six seconds but okay 😅
The patient had just been pushed to us from the ICU and he wasn’t mine, so at that point I knew absolutely nothing about him. Turns out he was admitted for vegetative endocarditis.
The wild part is that if I hadn’t been in the room to watch this man reboot himself in real time, we probably would have written the whole thing off as artifact. Mind you, this is a trauma center (pt also had necrotizing fasciitis). We’re used to patients crashing, but usually there’s a pretty obvious reason. Someone just casually flatlining for six seconds and then waking up like nothing happened is not something we see every day.