Code Blue
Categories : Work |
Whilst surfing a few blogs, I came across this entry by Karen Knapp about how she was sitting in an hospital cafeteria and watched someone grab her sandwich and run off in response to a PA call of a “code in Room 668″ Admirably, Karen spent the rest of her lunch break praying for whatever was happening in that room.
This brought back memories of my own days back in the hospitals as one of the doctors on the “arrest team” (known by various acronyms at different times). Nothing would get the pulse racing quicker than the distinctive tone the pager made to signify a “Code Blue” which was a medical emergency, and then hearing it over the PA as we raced to where-ever the emergency was going on. In those days I wasn’t quite as fit as I am now, and running at full pelt through a very big hospital would leave me gasping for breath when I arrived. Fortunately 4 out of 5 times it was generally a false alarm – the feeling of anti-climax was palpable. Speaking of getting puffed, I once heard of an anaesthetics registrar who had asthma, and had such a bad asthma attack from running to a code blue, that he himself needed Intensive Care admission.
I clearly remember the first “Code Blues” I attended with my mates as a fourth year medical student. It was so cool and exciting to be sprinting along the length of the great big main corridor of the hospital behind our registrar, stethoscopes bouncing around our necks. The excitement wore off though, and was replaced with a kind of melancholy, 45 minutes later when the code was called to an end, after prolonged CPR, multiple drugs and defibrillator shocks, all with no success. The really sad thing was that it was a fairly young man in his 40s, with a young family, who wasn’t sick – he’d just come into the hospital that day for a nuclear medicine scan – and never left. “Code Blues” were never quite so exciting after that…
