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whithou

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Posts posted by whithou

  1. Wow, I hope I don't encounter some of y'all on the road when I'm biking to work. Bike lanes are basically non existent in Houston so I take the lane when I'm on a two lane road (I don't bike on roads with just one lane). The speed limit will never be what I pedal so I guess y'all will have to slow down for a few minutes until you can safely pass. F me for trying to do a good thing for the environment and stay healthy. Most bikers I see around my area are just trying to get from point A to B and not decked all out in spandex. I do rock the spandex once a week but that's when I'm getting miles in on the bayous. 

     

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  2. 1 hour ago, Don Johnson said:

    Bike to work in Houston.  Damn.  Sweat must not be an issue.

    I leave at 6AM when it's still dark out and go at a leisurely pace so I'm not too sweaty when I get to the hospital. Wearing breathable scrubs helps too. My husband on the other hand is a sweaty mess when he gets to work but they have showers that he's able to use. 

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  3. 4 minutes ago, gsoda3 said:

     

    that's horrible, i hadn't heard how pregnant women who deliver while having covid are faring.  do the newborns have covid also?

    I know of one of them testing positive and having respiratory distress. I'm not sure if it was from COVID or from the fact that the baby was premature (30 weeker). 

  4. Things we've done as a family:

    - We are a one car household. I bike the kids to daycare on our electric cargo bike (Tern GSD). My husband and I also bike to work. We chose to live in the loop in Houston so we can walk to the grocery store and restaurants. 

    - I take all of our veggie and fruit scraps/used coffee beans to a nearby park that has a compost bin.

    - We buy most of our produce from the farmer's market. I try not to cook too many beef and pork based meals and instead use chicken as the main protein. The next step is to do vegetarian meals but it's been hard for me to get creative in that area. 

    - I shop at consignment shops to get used clothes 

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  5. 27 minutes ago, trauma babe said:

    I cannot stress this enough for anyone who lives in Austin (although this really applies to pretty much everywhere at this point)

    BE SAFE.

    What this means is don't get on your motorcycles. Don't go out on your ATV. Don't get on your jetskis. Don't ride the little mini scooters. Don't get super wasted. Don't do dangerous drugs. Basically don't engage in reckless, dangerous, and stupid behavior. The level 1 trauma center for central Texas has no trauma beds for you right now, because we admitted a man who fell like 60ft (on purpose) at 4:00am this morning and he took up the last one because, in a real bummer for him, he survived the fall. Of course, one or two beds might open up, but maybe we should save those for someone who has a stroke or something, mmkay? Watch Ted Lasso, fuck your partner, smoke some pot, stay indoors.

    I was off of work for five days. I worked last night. The night before I had a girls' night with some friends who are also ICU nurses in Austin, and they warned me that things had really taken a turn since I left last on Saturday morning. And they were right. There is palpable despair in our ICUs, and especially in our MICU, which is our COVID ICU. Don't get me wrong, watching people die always sucks, and it was really shitty watching so many already-sick and elderly patients die with COVID last summer/winter, but the patients that we get up there now are younger, healthier, but they crash just the same.  

    ALL INTUBATED PATIENTS IN OUR COVID ICU ARE UNVACCINATED

    And Delta makes it harder for us to get you off the vent. The things we learned over last year don't seem to work quite as well. So then you get the trach, the PEG, and if you don't die before then, your body basically just kind of starts to rot. I can go into much more detail if you're into that sort of thing. Just DM me.

    So get vaccinated. It will almost certainly keep that terrible stuff from happening, unless you are just a really unlucky son of a bitch. And it will really help your community's healthcare workers out. You are lucky we haven't all walked away from the job at this point. Shit is fucked. 

    (I was directly exposed to COVID because of the aforementioned jumper patient. We didn't get his test results back until after admitting him to the ICU, and his vent circuit broke right in front of my face. So I've got that going for me)

    Yep, it's wild here at my Houston ICU as well. My cardiac ICU has no cardiac patients. Instead, they are all replaced with COVID ones and we are a COVID ICU now. So hopefully no one has a heart attack right now as there are no beds for them at my hospital. We do have one intubated patient who had the first shot in July (no second shot). I'd say there's a 50/50 chance he'll make it. 

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  6. We're back to the surge status that we saw last spring at my hospital in Houston. We have been on full diversion for a couple of days now with COVID patients waiting for days in the emergency center due to no bed availability. Our hospital has been bleeding nurses to travel assignments, where they can make $120/hr, so we have been working with poor staffing in our ICUs. We had a neonatal nurse sent to my ICU to help us the last shift I worked. A COVID patient on the verge of intubation was convinced that he wanted to leave against medical advice because he thought he take care of himself better at home. He was tired of being told to lay on his stomach and to keep his Bipap mask on. It took our head doctor of the ICU to go talk to him and have him watch his vital signs monitor to see his oxygen levels drop from 88% on the Bipap to 70% with no supplemental oxygen to scare him enough that he stated he would stay one more day. Our doctor also offered to give him a tour of our ICU before he left so that the patient could see what the next step would be for him if he decided to leave our unit. That next step being sedated, paralyzed, and having a breathing tube down your throat. 

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  7. 9 minutes ago, Hpara759 said:

    The wife has been hands on taking care of ICU COVID since March....every day she works ....12-13 hours a shift. Her co-workers (not all but most) have caught and recovered from it....not her, not one little symptom.... amazing!

     

    Oh the the obligatory pic of wife....

     

    Has she gotten an antibody test to see if she has had it? I feel like I and most of the nurses have likely gotten it but testing is only offered if we have had symptoms. We have had a couple of patients that have gotten COVID while hospitalized so even with us all wearing masks it is still being spread around. 

  8. 9 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

    Why are they passing?

    Reasons from being "I don't want to be a guinea pig" to "Bill Gates wants to know where I am". I wish I was kidding. When I ask if they have read more about the vaccine most haven't done their own research. 

  9. At my Houston hospital we are now opening up a third COVID ICU overflow and a third medical/surgical and stepdown COVID overflow. We also now have travelers on our units as more nurses are calling off due to having COVID. I came onto shift the other day and saw an oxygen tank in our break room. I thought that was odd, and found out that one of the nurses couldn't breathe during her shift and she had to take a time out and get supplemental oxygen. A few days later she ended up testing positive for COVID. We have access to IPads now for our patients which brings about some heartbreaking conversations. A daughter was pleading for her dad to show some sign of life while he sat motionless on the ventilator. He's been off sedation for days but he is still unresponsive. One of our long stay COVID patients passed the other day. Her oxygen saturation read 1% on the ventilator. The lowest I have ever seen is in the 60s with a good oxygen saturation being between 90-100%. 

    While I was watching one of my unstable COVID patients through the window yesterday an IT contractor came up to me and told me that I should try to get COVID. I laughed and then stopped once I realized he was actually being serious. He said that we need herd immunity and that he had already gotten COVID to protect himself. I told him I'll pass on that on the off chance that I myself end up where my patient currently is. 

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  10. 31 minutes ago, B00M said:

    Just curious, did y'all consider cross-training nurses to prepare for this? It seems like all the nurses and doctors knew there'd be a nursing shortage. 

    Good luck and thank you!

    They did cross train nurses in anticipation of our surge staffing. I had nurses from the OR, PACU, and downgrade units shadow me. The cross training is really just for nurses from other units to get a feel for how it is in the ICU as under their scope they still cannot do ICU tasks. Currently I take care of 1-2 ICU patients. When we do switch to surge staffing I will be taking care of 3-6 ICU patients and have 1-3 nurses under me to do non-ICU tasks. Which isn't that helpful as the nurses assisting me will not be able to manage the ventilator or titrate medications which is a big part of COVID patient care. 

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  11. Update from my hospital in Houston. We are opening up another ICU and downgrade unit for COVID patients. Currently our four ICUs are full. For the patients that are in our emergency center I've heard from nurses there that they are reaching out to hospitals in places like College Station and Huntsville to take our COVID ICU patients since we are out of space. I worked overtime this week to make up for how short staffed we are as nurses are starting to have symptoms of COVID and calling in. We are pulling nurses from downgrade floors to take our patients, which is super unsafe since they don't have ICU experience. We did stop elective procedures this week on my unit but I'm worried that these patients that aren't able to get cardiac caths done will eventually come in emergently after having a heart attack. We had several of these the first time we shut down elective procedures. 

     

     

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