Interesting yesterday.............

One of my Hospice resident had a seizure yesterday, right in the middle of the Price Is Right! Must have been too much excitement. No! I am not making light of the situation, just blowing off some stress I guess.

We have this really cool wheel chair for him, it is called a tilt-in-space wheel chair and it does just that. We can tilt him back into a reclining position, or he can be totally upright. It also has a big tray that helps him to stay in the wheel chair and holds his dishes at the perfect height. Anyway, he was up in his chair, with his back to me, and I was out in the kitchen making lunch. All of a sudden I noticed he was shaking the tray. Here I have to say that some of my residents have limited verbal skills so it is not abnormal for them to bang on something to get my attention. Continuing to make lunch I called over to him, "What do you need ____?" No response, but the tray kept shaking, so I went over to see what he needed and it was apparent he was having a full blown seizure. My first thought was to call 911, but when one is on Hospice, you are to call them and not 911.

It just so happened that the young man that I hire to weed my garden had just arrived so I called out to him to get me the number for Hospice. Poor thing, he had no idea where the number would be, but found it anyway in the time it took my brain to realize that he would have no idea where I keep the number. Smart child!

Within minutes the nurse was on the phone, and was instructing me what to do. Now here is the cool part. There would have been no way that I could have gotten the resident out of his wheel chair and into his bed by myself. Normally I am home alone during the day, but it just happened (NO! NOTHING JUST happens)that my son was over doing some work for me and as I said so was my weeder. Between the three of us we were able to get the resident into bed and resting comfortably, and all seems to be well this morning. See how ALL of my needs are met without my even knowing that I am going to be needing. Amazing!

The events of yesterday reminded me of a very vidid memory from my teen years. I was with my sister, visiting a friend of hers, when the friends neighbor came running over, screaming, with a limp blue lipped toddler in her arms. Seems the child had choked on something and wasn't breathing. This woman totally paniced and all she could think to do to get help was run to the neighbor. Thank goodness she brought the child with her as she was so scared that she could only scream and babble. (The friend was able to dislodge whatever the child had swallowed and the child was fine by the way.)

This picture has always stayed with me, and I always worried about how I would react in the face of an emergency/crisis. Most of the things that happen to my children over the years were taken care of with owwee ice, (stitches needed a time or two for good measure) so I never really got tested with my children. I guess the closest I came to a real emergency was once when I was doing home care and a client passed out on me while sitting on the toilet in a tiny bathroom. (He wasn't going. He had dementia and I was working on getting him to remember where the toliet was so he could find it when needed. We had walked in there and he was taking a break.) As I am holding him to keep him from falling off the toliet, I called out to his son to call 911 in what I hoped was a calm voice. Probably not, because in my panic, I couldn't even remember the son's name so I'm going, "Um. Excuse me. Um, Could you call 911 please. Um..." Then I am trying to decide if I could get him off the pot and out the door to the hallway without hurting him as there was no room to lay him on the floor of the bathroom. All the time I am bargining with God to fix this for me because I really hadn't been paying attention during CPR, and I didn't know if he was a DNR, and..... All of a sudden the guy takes a really big gasping breath and starts to come out of it. He gets transported to the hospital, they can find nothing wrong, he comes home, and I'll be darned if he doesn't do the same thing to me the following week. Only this time the family says, "Can't we just wait to see if he comes out of it before we call 911?" Like I'm a doctor! But he came out quicker and I didn't have to force them to dial or have the guy's death on my shoulders.

So how is that for an exciting post? How are you in a crisis situation? Do you think it makes a difference who it is, and/or how much blood is involved, or do you think your reactions would be consistant no matter what the details? Just wondering.