Emergency in the ED: Treating Hemorrhagic Shock
Emergency nursing isn’t all drama and adrenaline.
As any ED nurse knows, most of what a nurse sees in the ED is not what would classify as real emergencies—the kind of exciting, life-threatening situations that might have actually been the reason they chose emergency nursing. That’s how it was for me, and getting hired as a new grad to work at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital, one of the country’s premier emergency services, was a dream come true.
However, I quickly learned that most of the people who came through our doors did not have exciting, life-threatening emergencies but rather the more humdrum “urgencies” of life—gastroenteritis, a sudden high fever, a small laceration that needed a few sutures, sprains, and minor fractures. Minor, comparatively speaking, but certainly not minor to the patient, and all requiring attentive care. (For a vivid and poignant inside view of emergency nursing today, see the photo essay in the September issue; the essay is based on Carolyn Jones’s new film, In Case of Emergency, to be released this week for Emergency Nurses Week.)
When the ED doors slam open.
But then there were those sudden life-or-death emergencies that raised everyone’s adrenaline levels—a patient bleeding out was one of the more dramatic scenes. They usually arrived […]
