SLAUGHTERHOUSE

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Have you been damaged or know someone who's died or been injured in a hospital?

Yes
6
86%
No
1
14%
 
Total votes: 7

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Tygrett
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SLAUGHTERHOUSE

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Disclosures: True stories from a Whistleblower for patient safety with a current case in front of The Supreme Court. Copyrighted material. You are the first to read Chapter 1 from the first book in a 3 book series. Please read it and tell me the good and the bad. I need to know what I am about to do is worth it. People have vanished or ended up dead for what I am about to do.

1 Slaughterhouse

“For success today, you must first look into yourself.” - Chinese Proverb

Everyone contemplates their existence at some point. We want to make sure our time spent on this earth is worth the taxing journey. An emotional roller coaster of searching for connections between the past, present and into the future is how we analyze working toward understanding ourselves and others. Forced to learn about our lives or how very fragile we are is not something you realize your first time out, it takes time. Now I understand it’s about time and time waits for no one. It’s earned and paid time to learn the truth. What’s important and what is not. For everything we experience makes up the human being we become, the bits and pieces that form us, guide and give us life. It interconnects us, the living things as we thrive and enrich one another. Fallacy? Try being alive with no connection to any living thing.

Before “the beginning”, before I received my nursing license and in the first few days within the steel walls of a hospital, the absolute fragility of life was explicit. A brain can cease function in a nanosecond never realizing thought again. A heart can stop beating out of profound loss and sorrow. As tough as we suggest, we are fragile as fine dust and when the wind stirs we return to the oblivion of carbon stardust from which we originated. Memories of my third year in nursing school working full-time as a student nurse in an emergency room obliterated every naïve belief. A matter of contention shattered what nursing appeared to be even before my career began. I could blame it on myself, chalk it up to an isolated incident, my imaginary high standards, even other’s ignorance. But the plain fact is that a doctor and a nurse manager killed a patient to cover up the doctor’s misdiagnosis!

You’re wondering as I how that could happen? Roughly thirty years later learning it happens, but when it does, you do everything possible to support a living body. You do not jerk life from its shell because of a mistake. This is not the first time I spoke. Even reporting it to the Chief of Police and his exact words burned to memory: “It’s your word against theirs, who do you think will win? Are you sure you’re willing to lose the time invested?” You can imagine my astonishment and shock of his reply as the word “lose” echoed and bounced off every neuron in my brain. Still repeating that a human being lost her life, I saw and became a part of it but that didn’t matter. Her life didn’t matter. Even today it’s difficult to understand why? The rigid foundation of life and law melted and fused into a lie. Way back in the beginning, I learned it's acceptable to kill people in particular circumstances.

Not knowing much about business, this would be the first time I saw upper-level functioning in a corporate business of healthcare. Little did I fathom everything centers on how some hospitals keep high ratings or death totals at a minimum. The C-Suite can make the human body commodity worth millions, even billions in revenue from flesh and bone, like choice cuts of beef. Authoritative and bigger than you or me. It’s about billions of dollars, even trillions, reputation, and power. It’s all about numbers, community standing, and worldwide reputation. For that to happen, it takes people and is akin to herding human beings as cattle into the slaughterhouse. Profound and life-altering when beliefs become contradicted in a few seconds. A safe place where the goal is to better people’s lives turned out very differently.

The first clue; disillusioned and somber faces of embittered, exhausted nurses and doctors came into focus. Understanding why so somber became crystal clear. The hollow eyes lacked sincere expression. A hardened brow solidified their game faces. Disassociated from pain, the emotional insult, and the failure of not being able to save a human life. Sometimes for lack of time or ambition, they refused to allow anything to penetrate them, or hurt them. It is the self-preservation that only comes with experiences which most times are uncontrollable. Resulting in a prolonged sensation of flight or fight wearing a body and spirit down. Forever grinding at the core of empathy survival prevails as pure adrenaline rushes in propelling healers headlong into the role of herders. They have no time for fragile humanitarian interaction and insidiously a place of healing becomes something like a slaughterhouse.

Emergency room employees are competitive and dislike losing. These gatekeepers man the front door of every thriving institution. That competitive nature creates a breed of an individual that functions in a constant survival mode for themselves and you. Those personalities will protect themselves first and at all costs. Somewhere along the line, CEO’s and corporation rules force professionals to become divorced from what they strived to be their destiny. Constantly consumed by threats or sanctions for not reaching “the numbers” required for maximum reimbursements. And in that divorce from their belief system, they become divorced from the marriage of a nurse or doctor to the patient. Eye contact became absent, head nods become faster while half-heartedly listening to patients. Reading the triage note or another doctor’s history and physical tells doctors all they need about a patient whether dead or alive and saves them time.

Although I will not name names, hospitals or Police Chiefs, I will tell this story as it occurred while working in a hospital emergency room. Not just any hospital, one where the most affluent people not only in that area received care, but our nation. The ambulance radio alerted us they were en route with a woman in full cardiac arrest. We prepared the needles, fluids, and medications to save her life. We stood alert, waiting for her arrival. My job would take over the chest compressions of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, (CPR) when needed. Every time a life is on the line adrenaline rises, and weighty energy fills the air. Almost causing hairs to stand on end. That is when the basic human drive to survive erupts in a time of crisis and is its deepest. Pulling at the core of who and all we are activating the survival instinct of a human race and it is stingingly powerful. All the professionals stood firm in their positions and the sound of a simple, large, black-rimmed clock ticked down seconds.

She arrived. The doors to the resuscitation room burst open with a sudden and familiar bang of metal on metal. A sound similar to the starting gun in a race jolting everyone into action. Visibly clear, exhausted emergency medical technicians performed hard, fast chest compressions. Faces sweaty as fatigue set in. An elderly African-American woman passed me. Eyes wide open, lifeless, and I wondered why she had such a look of fear. Intuitively I knew it wasn’t her time to go. Open eyes tried to grasp any connection to the living world. Searching for the people that would save her life. We pulled her onto the gurney and attached the heart monitor with the defibrillator to shock her heart back to life if possible. The doctor gave routine orders, and the nurse gave medications, and I continued the hard, fast chest compressions that would help jumpstart her life. We worked hard but no living heartbeat arose, not even a flicker.

After about fifteen minutes, a protocol for a flat line or asystole, the doctor pronounced her dead. All life-saving efforts ceased. She never had a heart rhythm on the monitor; flat-lined the entire time. Her weeping and afraid daughters waited in the consultation room where the doctor would deliver the devastating news that their mother died. They left me and the nurse in the room preparing the body for the family. The nurse’s back turned toward me as she scribbled her notes trying to get back to herding cattle. I respectfully cared for the mother. Tidying the area all along respecting her daughters would have one chance to see her. Before the finality of her casket, while she still had the softness and warmth of life within her. It was important to soften the woolen, white hair and move it back so they could see their mother’s face.

Painless, yet personal. It would be the final time they would kiss the softness of her cheek and take in that final maternal pheromone as they had done their entire lives since conception. They would say a terminal goodbye to their mother. Gently brushing her hair away from her face trying to soften the disheveled look of just going through everyone’s worst nightmare. Her eyes now closed and peaceful as I spoke to her with my mind, asking her humbly to put a word in with God for me as she passed through the pearly gates. I imagined her making her way up the lit steps to heaven. Golden trumpets blaring and the heavenly excitement of her arrival as the souls sung songs of Holy, Holy! In the beginning, on that day and even now sometimes, I aspire to harness everything within me to bring back the dead. Struggling to use every bit of energy I can muster. Even though knowing I have no right.

Aware it seems a strange thing to do, to revive the dead, yet still I try. It goes against the grain within me and most human beings to let life go when you have not exhausted your entire self to save someone. She was one of those times, bringing everything within me to raise the dead. Chipping away at myself, willing to weaken me to make her whole again. In this case, she was a mother and I dwelled on the sadness my daughter might endure if I died. Thinking of her daughter’s pain ignited me. The resurrection started by staring at her chest to see if she breathed at all on her own, even the slightest effort, an intermittent rise, or fall. Seeking desperately for a flicker, or muscle spasm of her face or eyes. I willed her to breathe with everything I had, wanting to tell her family that their mother remained alive. A penetrating stare, waiting, but not a flicker, no effort to breathe.

A body can be alive without breathing for a short time although brain damage is occurring. My eyes moved to her face and the breathing tube still in her mouth extending into her trachea. Seconds away from the forever silence of letting her go. Everyone prepared to accept her demise. Then suddenly the most unmistakable: Boom-Boom, Boom-Boom, Boom-Boom, of life, like thunder! The tube swayed with the perfect, living rhythm of a human heart as it bounced against her carotid artery. I lost my breath as my eyes widened, making sure what I saw was real and not imagined. A great sense of peace effervesced within me. I lifted her eyelid and examined her pupil. It shrunk and expanded like a camera lens, as though her life tried to regain focus, grab onto memories, or get its bearings and regaining control.

Upon instinctively turning on the monitor, at first, it read a flat-line as before and during the entire 15 minutes of life-saving efforts and beyond. I knew it was false as her pupils constricted and dilated, and her heartbeat strong enough to move the breathing tube. A soft whisper of recollection, yet as strong as a slap in the face. I remembered something learned in school: “Treat the patient not the monitor”. Impulsively I jiggled the shorted wires and in a flash, her heart rhythm appeared; a concrete sign of life. Excitement crackled in my voice when I alerted the nurse confidently: “She is alive!” The nurse looked at the tube, the monitor then told me to call the manager. I did. My excitement beamed overwhelmingly bright, and all that mattered today was those daughters didn’t lose their mother, and it felt personal.

The manager came in detached and agitated with me. Her eyes began to bulge looking at the monitor’s perfect rhythm of pure life dancing across the screen. Staring at the patient as though she expected her to be sitting up talking, suddenly blurting out “Oh God, he is pronouncing her to the daughters.” She flew out of the door as the sound of high heels faded away. After what seemed like seconds, the doctor, and the manager returned with faces pasty and white as beads of sweat swelled on their foreheads. Smiling, I glowed when they entered as though I had discovered the secret of life. Glaring at me, the doctor snapped: “Who turned on that goddamn monitor?” I told him I did without hesitation. In an angry, whispering but still powerful voice he said: “You never turn on a goddamn monitor without asking me first. Put your back against the door. Don’t let anybody in, NOBODY!”

A wave of sickness washed over me from his tone and secrecy, almost losing my balance or collapsing as though my entire being became weak. It’s oddly surreal, elementary and frightening when imminent death enters the air. Immediately your spirit senses it, and without hesitation, you give in as though yourself is threatened and begin fearing for your own life. No time to reason or beg for any life, including your own. Energy fills a locked room and something as light as air becomes asphyxiating like poison as you’re hurled into shock and disbelief. The brain ceases seeking logic returning to a primitive state and the eyes; those windows to the soul watch, waiting for an imprint that teaches the human bloodline what to avoid ensuring humanity survives. You pray for divine intervention in return for promises you recognize you will never keep. As a human being, top in the food chain, you become as small as a grain of sand.

The doctor sternly positioned himself and pushed down on her groin where the biggest arteries of the body branch off from the aorta pushing so hard he shook. Obstructing blood flow by the easiest access to the major artery in an already compromised, weakened heart. He told the manager to charge the potent electricity of the defibrillator to 360 joules (maximum) voltage. The familiar and penetrating whistling noise escalated as deadly power generated becoming almost unbearable in combination with knowing what would come. The shock paddles rested firmly and strategically on the old mother’s brittle chest. My heartbeat resonated like a steel anvil being struck pounding in my ears. I longed to scream out to them to stop. Overwhelming amidst the piercing, escalating whistle, the shock ready for the discharge, then absolute quiet as time stood still, and dolorously the manager shocked her with massive electricity!

The mother raised off the stretcher in a sudden jerk as though a soft rubber mannequin. Her arms and legs boundless, pounding back down, coming to a hushed rest. A faint aroma of scorched hair permeated the room and gave me chills. A pervasive absence of sound filled the room as the energy dissipated, and then nothing, just eight staring eyes, woefully waiting. Everyone stared at the mother’s lifeless face waiting for the sudden reprimand for what they had done. But the absolute quietus remained that only comes when life exists no more. The doctor moved first causing a chain reaction within the room. Arrogantly his eyes darted between the monitor and the patient’s chest. Waiting to see without a doubt that the maneuvers he selected to end her life remained rewarding. That he had killed her.

As he palpated for a pulse the daughters weighed heavily on my mind as I peeked remorsefully through the blinds finding it hard to see through the blur of hard tears. To my astonishment and overwhelming fear, her daughters stood right outside the door, waiting. The speed of my heartbeat increased again as I realized they’d heard what just happened behind the cold, steel walls of this slaughterhouse! My stomach contracted into a hard fist of anger, immediately bargaining for my soul realizing I was an unwilling part of this. To wipe the images away, to go back in time two short minutes. If they hadn’t heard, I wondered if intuition somehow played a role and they perceived their mother dead-alive and dead again. That final dissection between a life and its vessel, cutting the cord between a mother and her children? I whispered angrily that the daughters stood at the door.

I felt sick, feared I might vomit and drew deep breaths in and out. Hyperventilating, feeling my throat quiver as I exhaled trying desperately not to cry. My head was spinning, heart racing, and in my mind the voice of eternity, all things good and ethical screamed: “THEY MURDERED THAT WOMAN!” I immediately found myself in denial; there had to be a valid reason. Doctors do not do this; nurses don’t do this. A million thoughts raced through my mind seeking a rationale for what I witnessed as it ravaged everything I believed in, trusted and knew as life. Was I accessory to murder? What if the daughters heard the defibrillation and asked me questions? What if their mother comes back to life again? How can I work where murder covers up mistakes? Did I make a mistake? Did I bring her back from the dead with my will?

Was it a maneuver learned in medical school to end a suffering life in need of rest out of compassion? Then I considered it all again, replayed the movie I had just watched. Realizing the neck would leave marks but the groin where he pressed so hard would not. Every thought blared like a trumpet, analyzed, balanced in rebuttal, scrutinized and reanalyzed. Abruptly the void of silence prevailed when the manager opened the door. She hurried in front of the daughters to the bedside opposite the doctor blocking the girls from the chest and head area. Forcing them to stand near their mother’s legs. They would not easily see her breathing or heartbeat if it happened again. Intuition told me the daughters wanted to look at the mother’s face, to kiss her cheek but those in charge continued to block them from their final goodbye. Standing powerless by the door, knees buckling, I wanted to run and never look back.

The doctor stood right at the bedside blocking the daughters as if guarding the old mother’s soul, keeping it safe. When all along he was waiting for her return from death and praying for relief, begging God not to let it happen again. I tried to read him, his motives, but moreover tried to understand why he did what he did. All that was luminescent was his acting. Shining through as impeccable, deserving of an academy award for the keeper of the soul. It was those fearful, begging eyes of the daughters as they approached their mother that became seared into memory. When I try to remember what happened immediately after, I cannot. Dreamlike hours passed, then days and weeks, no one said anything about it. No one talked about why it happened, swept under the rug and the old mother was forgotten.

For me it was and remains decades later an unbearable idea; for a doctor and nurse to play a role in murder within the hospital. A sacred place where life lingers in a delicate balance. The nurse did not report it; the manager did not address it, and the doctor continued working in the emergency room. Years later I remember their names as it was yesterday. For the life of me, I cannot remember the old mother’s name and it was she who mattered most. Interviewing nurses about him, that “doctor”, and his work ethic and they said he was a good doctor. My first notion was sure if he kills all his mistakes. I found it difficult to work with him or see him. I had no trust in him or his ethics. Time passed and seemed unreal as unrelenting dreams and hearing the charging sound of the defibrillator jolted me from sleep. I quit the job and had lost the desire to be a nurse altogether and gained an overwhelming fear of being one.

Today I know those feelings that haunted me then and that haunt me now are Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and that was day one of many. When you dream about it, startled, fearful, and even have a physical response of flight or fight when you talk about it, you’re damaged. I still wonder how many died under that doctor’s watch all these years later. Somewhere in the back of my mind, wondering when I might go through that kind of deliberation again. Or the day they might force me to kill someone? Those thoughts never leave the conscious mind. Why would I ever expect the doctor wouldn’t be as excited the woman did not die, and her life saved? In trying to understand why he would have gotten so angry by the monitor being turned on. Only to learn later that the monitor once turned on was a permanent record of events recorded inside and used as evidence should the need arise. The word evidence; stern, threatening and life-altering. What would that matter if we had done nothing wrong?

An assumption, someone had something to hide. Perhaps he’d been through this before. Someone knew how to cover up evidence. Had infancy of my career blinded facts before me? After the evaluation of facts, every scorned memory, I understand it as murder. No other answer surfaced contradictory to the fact. Such as, why that doctor was so angry the cardiac monitor got turned on? My father taught me to walk a mile in another man’s shoes and figure out how that man might think. What I learned was the moment where life and death lingered a man towered. A doctor who had spent his life learning, healing and sometimes covering up his mistakes at all cost. Initial intentions honorable, still forced to decide in a fading moment about the value of his life or time invested. A few words echo in my mind about time and if a person wills to sacrifice it; “everything lost”.

The last weeks of nursing school were terrible after that experience and that was when the desire first eluded me. My grades declined, my desire dwindled even to the point I quit going to school. Then, my instructor showed up at my apartment and I heard a sheepish rattle on the door. I guessed it was a neighborhood kid coming to play with my daughter. Opening the door surprised, we stared at one another, her apprehension and my confusion. If known, I would have never answered the door, and she sensed that. Initially insulted, followed by confusion yet still seeking the aptitude of my leader. Both our strengths faded when our eyes met, and I knew she re-lived through me the stern face of “nursing” in all its ugly glory. Sadness, anger, and betrayal stung like a bitter slap in the face. I felt vulnerable as though fractured without strength or conviction of my decisions, I crumbled.

I cried and hard, unable to catch my breath, I told her my experience even though somehow it seemed she already knew or found it a regular occurrence. She was not shocked nor repulsed, just emotionless and in charge. It was the first time I had spoken of it. Needing to talk about it but to someone who found it as unacceptable as I did or was at least able to pretend it was. Bluntly she said knowing more than I should have this early in my career is why it happened, not that they did not kill that woman. “These things happen every day.” If I wanted to work in the emergency room to get used to it. She said, “Think about the time you’ve spent and if it was worth wasting it all?” Five long years with nothing gained, everything lost. I was so very close. Was all that time worth the risk it may never happen again?

The cards were on the table; she said: “You need to decide today; I will drop you from the program tomorrow if you do not show up.” The last semester of five full-time years and nothing to show for it except life and the truth of what it was. No way to forget what happened, only scorned memories to learn from. When you are about to lose everything worked so hard for, you realize that it is not just about you. Not how scared you perceive yourself to be, but everything and everyone in life tied to you; your children, parents, husbands, wives, the past, present, and future. Life passes before your eyes as you are fully aware a part of you is meek. Everyone who depends on you and their sacrifices come into sharp focus. Then the reality of life throttles up and you realize this is the part of you where honor lives. An unequivocally, razor-sharp blow as innocence is lost forever.

The next day, reluctantly I took my seat in class in the back as usual, with such a decline of respect for the profession and heightened fear. It was hard to hear what the instructor taught knowing what she was saying was only half-truths. Keeping my mouth shut and not talking to my classmates about the experience, I went to the class leaving early, going home wondering what the future held. Upon finishing my degree, my GPA went from 4.0 to 3.1. The “grace of God” was not what redeemed me, it was a lifetime of maintaining a lie that created the 4.0 cushion that saved this servant. I didn’t buy a cap or gown or send out invitations. I didn’t attend graduation ceremonies; it was not a celebration for me. After becoming the nurse, I dreamed I wanted to be, it was an easy vow to myself to never let people entrusted in my care suffer violation again. I became my brother’s keeper but only within my mind.

Individually most people can handle the ability to survive; it is inherent within us. When survival becomes threatened, it becomes unbearable when carrying the weight of others and their vulnerability. It is heavy, like the weight of the world including all its elements like water, sand, sorrow, and iron. It is like human cells becoming one individual through the natural process of cell division. Once conceived, even one cell gets heavy, but when one becomes two, then four, eight, then the weight of a community, a state, and then the nation. Bearing that kind of load is a crushing weight. Rather than becoming inert or making a conscious decision to abandon the entire idea, you pull everything from deep inside to save a single life or an entire world. Those capabilities stem from beliefs of moral rights and the souls carried within you as you begin your journey. Within the blink of an eye, one becomes a crusader.
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DATo
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Post by DATo »

This is an amazing story and very well presented.

Your story is a microcosm of an issue that is prevalent in the world at large. It is ubiquitous, and it is both frightening and disgusting. You find it in every profession from education to politics. It is a demonstration of the naturally inculcated phenomena we refer to as the instinct of survival. Corporations and institutions may be analogized as the organism; the departments within them - the organs; and the workers may be considered the cells, bodily fibers, and serums which maintain the welfare of the whole. The prime imperative of this holistic entity is survival at any cost, and if the cost require an aberration and adulteration of the laws of morality and decency then so be it.

I have been a witness to this myself in the field of higher education at the university level. I have also known a nurse who divulged a similar story. She refused to administer drugs to a patient which she knew had the potential to kill him. She was on late shift and the doctor in question prescribed the medication by phone while he was attending a New Year's Eve party. She was soon on the carpet before an investigating committee where she was in danger of losing her nursing license. Let it be said, to the hospital's credit, that she was completely exonerated. If this is so then it is obvious that the doctor was in error. So the pressing question remains: what happened to the doctor? He continued to practice. QED

At times when I reflect upon my life and beat myself up for things I regret I remind myself that this was the only thing I could do at that particular moment in my life. We are the product of our experiences and the person we are today is different than the person we were yesterday; therefore, do not punish yourself with recriminations. We all transition from a time of innocence to a time of reality and as the poet once said, "That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight, though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower, we will grieve not, but rather find strength in what remains behind." - W. Wordsworth

You have a winner in embryo. You are now at that ethical bridge. Cross it!

/
“I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed reading accident. I hit a book mark and flew across the room.”
― Steven Wright
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Tygrett
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Post by Tygrett »

Thank you. I'm not a reader of books, therefore, not a writer. I don't know what my genre is or what these books are classified as, or anything to do with writing! My career has been as a nurse traveler for the past 25 years seeking a home and where you certainly don't gather friends; "a rolling stone gathers no moss". There is no one to ask to read nor evaluate, so input here is all I have and is extremely valuable. Again, thank you.
My regret is that I ever became a part of this great realm called "healthcare". But then, would anyone see what I saw and live to tell?
Be safe.
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Post by DATo »

You say you are not a writer? Then don't attempt to emulate a writer. When writing non-fiction (which is the genre you are writing with this piece) just write like you are talking to someone. Writers are overrated. A person who can tell a story is a treasure. Start over and write it in your own voice.

You are sorry that you got involved in healthcare? Don't be. For every doctor like the one you described above there are thousands of doctors and nurses who are consummately dedicated to their professions. I believe you are one of them. In the not to distant future you are going to be reading about a whole new variety of hero, and they will come from the ranks of health care workers. I had a CT scan Friday. The nurse attendants at the door, wearing masks and gloves, checked me for fever before admitting me to the building. I was OK. When I was leaving I told the two of them that I was grateful to them and viewed them with great respect for what they are doing. They, like you, probably don't hear that very often, but I think they will in the future.
“I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed reading accident. I hit a book mark and flew across the room.”
― Steven Wright
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Post by Tygrett »

Again, thank you very, very much. You are an inspiring kind of man.
About the temperature checking. I wrote to the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare today. Their screening practices offer only false security. Now that the virus has allowed those infected to tell their stories, many had no symptoms at all, including no fever. So, in checking only the temperature, everyone is wrong across the entire globe.

When the body is under stress, hemodynamically a lot of things happen to compensate. The heart rate speeds up and/or beats more powerfully (bounding), the respiratory rate also. Later the blood pressure drops as energy is consumed elsewhere (like a fast heart rate) and the body starts decompensating. In illness, especially in the elderly and chronically ill what appears to be a normal temperature compared to "normal" vital signs may actually be a fever. The people who are older, right now historically lived through horrible times to survive during and post the Great Depression. They worked their bodies harder, thereby creating a "lean machine" and a great physical foundation for the future (later destroyed by the new riches of a thriving country). Some of their heart rates are in the 50's or 60 ranges because their hearts remain strong, so a heart rate of "normal" 70 and even 80, and up to 100 is considered normal. That is actually 10, 20, or even 40 beats higher and a concrete sign something is very wrong. For a younger person, that could be a heart rate of 140 and is beyond what is considered Tachycardia at 120 maximum.

About temperature, the elderly lose the fat under the skin and are chronically cooler. That's why they are always in sweaters and if you enter their homes, the heat will run you out! Their temperature normals can be in the low 96 to high 95-degree range. To add 4 degrees, let's say to 96.5 degrees, it is actually 100.5 degrees and the cut off published is 100.4. Right now, there is no mention of that in the literature pertaining to isolating and screening for this aggressive virus. The visible signs come far later when a few have been exposed and they spread it to thousands!

I, although I am just a nurse told them blatantly they are wrong with all their doctors and specialist in the way we are screening and gave them my recommendations. My focus is life, not death and if I am out of line, then I am and it will not be the first time nor the last. I also told them to credit MY work and take a complete set of vital signs; blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, and temperature. The oxygen level would be null because if the body is breathing faster, the oxygen will be falsely high anyway.

We only have one chance to get this right and we are failing as the big machine that sleuths gold from bones, sweat, and tears!
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Post by DATo »

I don't know if you've heard, but in many countries people are going outside at an appointed time and cheering the healthcare workers in unison. It is amazing to recall that a year ago a healthcare worker would not have dreamed of being thrust into the position they now find themselves in. It is a reminder that at any time, convenient or not, we might be called upon to step up to the plate to defend our fellow citizens much the same as a soldier in war. We already have the Green Berets. When this is over nurses should be given Pink Berets (blue for males *L*) and accorded a similar level of honor and respect.
“I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed reading accident. I hit a book mark and flew across the room.”
― Steven Wright
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