About Marcy Phipps, BSN, RN, CCRN, CFRN

Chief flight nurse at an international air ambulance service.

Nurses Week: Comparing Notes on Matters of the Heart

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay, “The Love Song of Frank,” was published in the May issue of AJN.

Image courtesy of Wikemedia Commons

Earlier this week I took care of a man who nearly coded, rather unexpectedly. I was standing next to his bed when his heart rate slowed suddenly and significantly, with one extraordinarily long pause between beats.

A pause doesn’t have to be extraordinarily long to feel like it is, especially when you’re standing next to someone, palpating their pulse while watching the monitor. In this case, in this five-second pause that felt like minutes, I’d dropped the bed rail, shouted out to my team, and was ready to start chest compressions when his heart beat again. His symptomatic bradycardia was treated accordingly; there were no chest compressions, and it was no code.

I had lunch with a good nurse-friend of mine who works in a nearby hospital. I was telling her how “bradycardia with a five-second pause” feels a lot like asystole, when you’re standing next to your patient, and she was telling me that her hospital had sort of cancelled Nurses Week this year. Instead of the traditional week of silly games, superlative awards, and physician-sponsored lunches, and then a later “Hospital Week,” her facility was having a combined “Team Member Week.”

“It feels like we’ve lost recognition,” my friend said. “We don’t feel appreciated, and we’re angry.”

I definitely see […]

2016-11-21T13:10:11-05:00May 9th, 2012|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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At the Terminus of Romantic Dreams, an ICU

It was early. The sun had yet to rise, but already the ICU was filled with stark fluorescence and beeping alarms. My patient sat alone and aphasic, helpless amidst the bustle of the unit. The day stretched long ahead of us.

The circumstances of Frank’s admission were unusual. The nursing report (conveyed with a snicker) was that, while vacationing in our coastal city with his mistress, he’d slipped away and visited yet another lady friend. While engaged in an “intimate” act, he’d hit his head on the coffee table and been knocked unconscious.

The paramedic’s report backed up that version of events, but Frank’s admission CT scans of the brain weren’t consistent with head trauma. Instead, a vascular abnormality was found. He’d suffered two seizures since admission to the hospital.

That’s the start of “The Love Song of Frank,” the Reflections essay in the May issue of AJN. Click on its title to read the entire essay (and, once there, perhaps click through to the PDF version for the best read). 

Those of you who know the T. S. Eliot poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (beautifully spun, and a favorite of bookish adolescents for its highly quotable and world-weary take on conventional society) will recognize the irony in the title.

But the essay, by ICU nurse and regular AJN blogger Marcy Phipps, stands on its own in its sympathetic but unsentimental description of a nurse’s encounter with a man who’s reached the limits of […]

2016-11-21T13:10:15-05:00April 26th, 2012|nursing perspective|3 Comments
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The ‘Inexhaustible Well’: Notes from a Trauma Nurse on Mortality

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay, “The Love Song of Frank,” will be published in the May issue of AJN.

Years ago, long before I was a nurse, I read The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles. He speaks of the tendency of people to take life for granted, and says that in the unpredictability of death there lies a presumption that everything is limitless:

“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.” 

Lately, especially at work, that quote has edged forward and lingered with me. The ICU I work in is primarily devoted to trauma, but there’s been a recent shift in patient demographics. Last week I took care of only one trauma patient—an athlete who’d […]

2016-11-21T13:10:16-05:00April 19th, 2012|Nursing, Patients|7 Comments
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Losses: In Search of an Honest Prognosis

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay, “The Soul on the Head of a Pin,” was published in the May 2010 issue of AJN.

Several years ago I took care of a lady who’d suffered a small cerebral hemorrhage after falling and hitting her head. She was in the ICU for several days. Her husband stayed at her side constantly, and he became a part of a never-ending loop in which she would wake up startled to be in a hospital, and then notice her husband and ask him where she was and what had happened.  He’d hold her hand and gently relay the events of her injury, after which she’d react with mild surprise, every single time. Then she’d close her eyes and doze until she woke up to reinitiate the same conversation.

Her husband, after days of patiently playing his role in this repetitive scene, was clearly wearing down. He waited anxiously for the neurosurgeon, expecting explanations and hoping for reassurance.

When the neurosurgeon rounded later that day I heard him speak at great length about the details of her injury and the treatment plan. He ultimately advised that, although he thought she’d recover well, only time would tell.

Her husband wanted more than […]

2016-11-21T13:10:27-05:00March 19th, 2012|patient engagement|1 Comment
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On Cats Sucking the Breath Out of Babies, and Other Health Superstitions

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay, “The Soul on the Head of a Pin,” was published in the May 2010 issue of AJN.

I recently babysat a friend’s busy toddlers, and was happy to share the long (but lovely) day with a good friend who happens to also be a nurse. We’d just gotten the babies tucked into their cribs and were stepping out of the nursery with a sigh when I noticed the family’s cat lounging in a padded rocking chair, blinking lazily at us.

“Wait!” I said, scooping up the cat. “We can’t leave the cat here. Cats suck the breath out of babies!”

My friend looked at me like I’d lost my mind, and I instantly wished that I hadn’t said it.  The absurdity of the statement was clear to me. And yet it felt like a truth I’d known forever, even if I couldn’t remember why.

As it turns out, it was something I was told as a child—by my grandmother. Knowing this makes my statement make sense, at least to me, as I adored my grandma and would have accepted anything she told me as undisputed truth. Even so, I’m surprised (and a little embarrassed) that in spite of higher […]

2016-11-21T13:10:43-05:00February 15th, 2012|nursing perspective|0 Comments
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