Assault on the Senses: Part Auditory

When I get home at night (or get home in the morning) I hear incessant beeping. Ventilator alarms. SCD alarms. IV pumps. Heart rate alarms. Apnea alarms. Tube feed pumps. Are you getting where I am going with this? It's an overload of my auditory system and the noises creep in to haunt me in my dreams. It's like I live there. All the time. This whole thing is nuts.

When I first started working in the ICU, I ran around like a frantically confused sprinter, dashing left and suddenly turning right as if I'm in a seriously deranged scavenger hunt. Looked quite insane not surprisingly. Why, you ask? Because as a resident, you HAVE to respond to your alarms because despite the fact that there are 12 other people around, it's the middle of the day, family is at the bedside, and I can actually see him from where I'm sitting...I need to be there in 2.4 seconds. Time travel is slower than your reaction time.

The resident downfall is you haven't yet determined which alarm makes which noise. It's a cruel but entertaining game for everyone else as I run around trying to prove my worth and figure out which patient is beeping, is this alarm something vital, or can I go back to being behind on my charting and making my crazy to-do list. (Residency leads to an unexpected level of insanity; I think I was normal before I started all this...)

I tell Javier to quit bending his arm because every time he does, the IV pump stops working. He clearly does not comprehend this and I try again in espanol. Then in french. I even make up some Mandarin just for good effort and use extravagant hand gestures. No luck. Short of taping him arm to the bed, I have no choice but to sit there and play that game where you hit the head of the mole as many times as quickly as you can. Because clearly I'm too intimidated at this point to just put in another IV and switch the line. Way to NOT be resourceful Nat.

One night I have a patient who I personally diagnosed as paranoid schizo, ADHD, Bipolar, defiant, and plain freakin crazy- for one characteristic. He ground his teeth. AUDIBLY. ALL NIGHT. So I spent the 12 hours having a consistent layer of goosebumps because I was sitting in front of nails on a chalkboard. We tried a bite block. I tried to rebuke him in spanish. I gave him every drug and he was just as chipper as ever. Drug tolerance is a bitch.

As if my ears weren't already ruined for life, I now know every cuss word in the dictionary. In spanish. I can't even begin to talk about this because my mother reads this. (Hi, mom). You'll get a neuro patient who has DAI and doesn't have the slightest clue what's going on in the world. They just know that you are princess star sword and you are going to leave them there with the monkeys to die. Yes, clearly that's what's happening here. They cuss and you tell them to shut it, "that's not appropriate talk, this is a hospital", and they continue to keep you as a fish on their line who has to stay at their bed to continually re-iterate that, despite the fact that they are being torchered by us (the evil pirates), we are in fact, trying to save your demented self.

I could go on and on and on and on (wilco song anyone?) of stories that hurt my ears to recall. At least now I have mastered the alarms and can watch new residents and make fun of them. In an empathetic way. I feel for you, little baby nurse who burns 12,000 calories a day in constant motion. It's the way it goes around here.

And I've never been more thankful for my full set of lovely, not ground teeth.