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alizesmom
02-25-2008, 03:30 AM
At 2:30am Friday morning, my husband and I found ourselves doing CPR on our 3 yr old daughter. She had decanulated herself and ended up in resp and cardiac arrest. Thank God she is okay. My reason for telling you this: her nurse had silenced her alarm without looking to see what was wrong. Then, when she did realize there was a problem she went to our room for help without doing anything for our daughter. There was another nurse in the house not 20 foot from her (we have 2 medically needy children and each has a nurse at night). She didn't call him for help, she didn't yell for help instead she left my daughter alone. As my husband and I did CPR, our son's nurse called 911 and helped out, our daughter's nurse just sort of puttered around. I can't tell you the agony we are going through for trusting this nurse. She didn't mean harm and in fact was a nice person whom my daughter really liked. That doesn't change the outcome.

If you choose to do home care nursing, you will need to function more independently. You must be decisive. You must be prepared for any emergency and know how to act. Plan what you would do "just in case". Don't let the long boring night put you too much at ease. We came so close to losing our little one. Don't let it happen to someone else.

Love My 7 GEMS
03-23-2008, 01:47 AM
Karen... I hope you reported her to the agency. I know your little one liked her, but this person has no buisness being in a homecare setting if she can't handle a crisis of this kind. You are ABSOLUTELY right in what you say... and I'm so sorry that your nurse wasn't more 'on the ball' for you that night. Very glad it turned out 'okay'...but that sure could have had a different outcome if just a minute more had passed.

{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{HUGS}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}

Dori~Who did homecare/vent dependant patients for 20 years.....

brainandspinalcord
08-18-2008, 12:22 PM
That's unbelievable! I mean one of those trained dogs would have done a better job, as you would have been alerted more quickly. I know from my son being in the hospital that the alarms can get to be so commonplace they all just seem to be "false alarms" after a while.
BUT your nurse should have started CPR immediately after realizing something was wrong, that's her job, right? I can completely understand how you wouldn't be able to trust her anymore. Were you able to get a different nurse for your daughter?

alizesmom
08-19-2008, 12:22 PM
It took awhile but we have new nurses in place who seem competent. Trust is hard to come by and we now have a video/audio monitor in our room where we can hear/see if there are problems. Karen