Cardiac Nurse Quotes

Ignore him," Heather begged. "I do. Constantly." Jean-Luc studied the coach, then turned to Heather with a wary look. "Every man in this town wants you." She laughed. "Yea, right. The old guys from the nursing home go into cardiac arrest whenever I walk by." His gaze drifted over her. "I can believe that.

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has the edge over even the finest biscuit. But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good.... ....An endeavor endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.

As she explained to her students, patients often awoke from very bad illnesses or cardiac arrests, talking about how they had been floating over their bodies. “Mm-hmmm,” Norma would reply, sometimes thinking, Yeah, yeah, I know, you were on the ceiling. Such stories were recounted so frequently that they hardly jolted medical personnel. Norma at the time had mostly chalked it up to some kind of drug reaction or brain malfunction, something like that. “No, really,” said a woman who’d recently come out of a coma. “I can prove it.” The woman had been in a car accident and been pronounced dead on arrival when she was brought into the emergency room. Medical students and interns had begun working on her and managed to get her heartbeat going, but then she had coded again. They’d kept on trying, jump-starting her heart again, this time stabilizing it. She’d remained in a coma for months, unresponsive. Then one day she awoke, talking about the brilliant light and how she remembered floating over her body. Norma thought she could have been dreaming about all kinds of things in those months when she was unconscious. But the woman told them she had obsessive-compulsive disorder and had a habit of memorizing numbers. While she was floating above her body, she had read the serial number on top of the respirator machine. And she remembered it. Norma looked at the machine. It was big and clunky, and this one stood about seven feet high. There was no way to see on top of the machine without a stepladder. “Okay, what’s the number?” Another nurse took out a piece of paper to jot it down. The woman rattled off twelve digits. A few days later, the nurses called maintenance to take the ventilator machine out of the room. The woman had recovered so well, she no longer needed it. When the worker arrived, the nurses asked if he wouldn’t mind climbing to the top to see if there was a serial number up there. He gave them a puzzled look and grabbed his ladder. When he made it up there, he told them that indeed there was a serial number. The nurses looked at each other. Could he read it to them? Norma watched him brush off a layer of dust to get a better look. He read the number. It was twelve digits long: the exact number that the woman had recited. The professor would later come to find out that her patient’s story was not unique. One of Norma’s colleagues at the University of Virginia Medical Center at the time, Dr. Raymond Moody, had published a book in 1975 called Life After Life, for which he had conducted the first large-scale study of people who had been declared clinically dead and been revived, interviewing 150 people from across the country. Some had been gone for as long as twenty minutes with no brain waves or pulse. In her lectures, Norma sometimes shared pieces of his research with her own students. Since Moody had begun looking into the near-death experiences, researchers from around the world had collected data on thousands and thousands of people who had gone through them—children, the blind, and people of all belief systems and cultures—publishing the findings in medical and research journals and books. Still, no one has been able to definitively account for the common experience all of Moody’s interviewees described. The inevitable question always followed: Is there life after death? Everyone had to answer that question based on his or her own beliefs, the professor said. For some of her students, that absence of scientific evidence of an afterlife did little to change their feelings about their faith. For others,

The other feature of this list is that many of these signals could easily be viewed as obvious and redundant. For instance, do highly experienced professionals like nurses and anesthesiologists really need to be explicitly told that their role in a cardiac surgery is important? Do they really need to be informed that if they see the surgeon make a mistake, they might want to speak up? The answer, as Endmondson discovered, is a thundering yes. The value of those signals is not their information but in the fact that they orient the team to the task and to one another. What seems like repetition is, in fact, navigation.

With the lens of Jobs to Be Done, the Medtronic team and Innosight (including my coauthor David Duncan) started research afresh in India. The team visited hospitals and care facilities, interviewing more than a hundred physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, and patients across the country. The research turned up four key barriers preventing patients from receiving much-needed cardiac care: Lack of patient awareness of health and medical needs Lack of proper diagnostics Inability of patients to navigate the care pathway Affordability While there were competitors making some progress in India, the biggest competition was nonconsumption because of the challenges the Medtronic team identified. From a traditional perspective, Medtronic might have doubled down on doctors, asking them about priorities and tradeoffs in the product. What features would they value more, or less? Asking patients what they wanted would not have been top of the list of considerations from a marketing perspective. But when Medtronic revisited the problem through the lens of Jobs to Be Done, Monson says, the team realized that the picture was far more complex—and not one that Medtronic executives could have figured out from pouring over statistics of Indian heart disease or asking cardiologists how to make the pacemaker better. Medtronic has missed a critical component of the Job to Be Done.

The best and largest cohort studies in nutritional epidemiology, such as the Adventist Health Study, the Iowa Women’s Health Study, the Nurses’ Health Study, the Physicians’ Health Study, and the CARE Study all confirm that eating nuts and seeds is associated with a 30–50 percent decreased risk of CAD death, primarily sudden cardiac death, and dramatic decreases in all-cause mortality.

I was on my own to cover the hundreds of patients there, some of the sickest of the sick. It was on one of those nights that, staggering through a sleep-deprived haze, I got the call. Up until then, all the deaths I had seen were those in which the patient was either dead on arrival or had died during cardiac “codes,” when we try desperately, and nearly always unsuccessfully, to resuscitate. This man was different. He was wide-eyed, gasping for air, his cuffed hands clawing at the bed. The cancer was filling up his lungs with fluid. He was being drowned by lung cancer. While he thrashed desperately, pleading, my mind was in medical mode, all protocols and procedures, but nothing much could be done. The man needed morphine, but that was held on the other side of the ward, and I’d never get to it in time, let alone back to him. I was not popular on the prison floor. I had once reported a guard for beating a sick inmate and was rewarded with death threats. There was no way they’d let me through the gates fast enough. I begged the nurse to try to get some, but she didn’t make it back in time. The man’s coughing turned to gurgling. “Everything’s going to be okay,” I said. Immediately, I thought, What a stupid thing to say to someone choking to death. Just another lie in probably a long line of condescension from other authority figures throughout his life. Helpless, I turned from doctor back to human being. I took his hand in my own, which he then gripped with all his might, tugging me toward his tear-streaked, panic-stricken face. “I’m here,” I said. “I’m right here.” Our gaze remained locked as he suffocated right in front of me. It felt like watching someone being tortured to death. Take a deep breath. Now imagine what it would feel like not to be able to breathe. We all need to take care of our lungs.

Another time, Dora Davis from Oklahoma started yelling at Rachel LaThorpe for stealing her parking space outside the Jenny Lake Visitor Center one summer day in 2017. Dora got so worked up, screaming and cursing, that her heart stopped. Suffering an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest was usually the end for most people, but it was Dora’s lucky day because Rachel—the woman she’d just been cursing at—was a nurse and began CPR. Teton rangers responded and continued treating Dora, and days later she walked out of the hospital with full neurological function.

You need to have a diploma from nursing school and be certified as a registered nurse.             Ideally, you should have at least two to three years of clinical experience as an outpatient nurse or as an emergency room nurse.             You should be certified in Basic Life Support and Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS). Some cruise lines request Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) certification as well.             You may need to have experience in dealing with laboratory procedures and basic x-ray procedures as there is not likely to be a lab tech or x-ray tech on duty.             You should have a background in general medicine and/or emergency medicine.             You should have past experience caring for patients in a trauma, cardiac care, emergency care, or internal medicine practice.             Because cruise liners travel to often to foreign lands and have people of all different cultures on board, you may need to have knowledge of other languages besides English.   As

The medal had been moved from her shirt to her hospital gown. It had seemed so important to her parents that I mentioned it in passing to the cardiac surgery resident as we sat writing chart notes in the nursing station on the evening before the surgery. He gave me a cynical smile. “Well, to each his own,” he said. “I put my faith in Dr. X,” he said, mentioning the name of the highly respected cardiac surgeon who would be heading Immy’s surgical team in the morning. “I doubt he needs much help from Lourdes.” I made a note to myself to be sure to take the medal off Immy’s gown before she went to surgery in the morning so it wouldn’t get lost in the OR or the recovery room. But I spent that morning in the emergency room, as part of

Immy spent the next day or two undergoing tests, and I saw her several more times. The medal had been moved from her shirt to her hospital gown. It had seemed so important to her parents that I mentioned it in passing to the cardiac surgery resident as we sat writing chart notes in the nursing station on the evening before the surgery. He gave me a cynical smile. “Well, to each his own,” he said. “I put my faith in Dr. X,” he said, mentioning the name of the highly respected cardiac surgeon who would be heading Immy’s surgical team in the morning. “I doubt he needs much help from Lourdes.” I made a note to myself to be sure to take the medal off Immy’s gown before she went to surgery in the morning so it wouldn’t get lost in the OR or the recovery room. But I spent that morning in the emergency room, as part of

Marilyn was in a shallow sleep beside his bed—dozing, really, because she was still aware of the nurses’ incremental visits and the green glow of the cardiac monitor—and there was a nervy ache in her neck whose presence she was nursing like a plant, leaning into it and setting the soreness ablaze, feeding it all of her negative thoughts.

A few years earlier, Forssmann had performed the first human cardiac catheterization—on himself. Assisted by a nurse and some painkillers, he made an incision at his elbow and carefully threaded a thirty-inch rubber catheter—the kind used to drain urine from the kidneys—through a large vein in his arm. Upon reaching the shoulder blade, Forssmann walked down a flight of stairs to the hospital’s X-ray room, the tubing still inside him, and got the technician on duty to record the moment when the outer point of the catheter touched the right chamber of his heart. Forssmann had not only done the medically unthinkable, he’d filmed it for posterity.

Nonetheless, after installing 1,000 shelves and following 2,060 cardiac arrest cases over ten years—which had yielded just two out-of-body cases—with our luck, both of them had been in areas of the hospital without a shelf! So our research staff were unable to ask if they had “seen” any of the independent objective images; and once more, the images were not able to be used. This is the reality of very low rates of survival after cardiac arrest, combined with the rare recall of the out-of-body phenomenon among survivors. However, our findings did support the results of another significant scientific study that had been published in 2001 in the The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, by Dutch cardiologist Dr. Pim van Lommel. He and his team had studied 344 cardiac arrest subjects and found one patient who had also reported a so-called out-of-body experience. As the man’s mouth was opened to insert a breathing tube during CPR, his doctors noticed that he had dentures. One nurse then removed them quickly and placed them in a specific drawer before continuing to help with the resuscitation. After ninety minutes the man’s heartbeat was restored, and he later recovered. A week later, he was transferred back to the ward where that same nurse happened to be working. The man recognized her, even though he had been unconscious the entire time during his CPR. This really baffled the nurse. He then recounted where his dentures had been placed. He later told Dr. van Lommel that during the cardiac arrest: “I was floating up near the ceiling, and I was trying to let everyone know I was still alive because I was afraid, they were going to stop trying to resuscitate me.” Based on this description alone, he, too, had likely maintained conscious awareness for some minutes while his heart was not beating and he was undergoing CPR.

I was a twenty-six-year-old intern when I met Paula in the ER as Elmhurst. I was the supervising resident's face darken with worry as he realized the urgency of the situation; I saw the anguish of the cardiology team as they arrived too late to save her from a death that could have, should have, been prevented. If only the triage nurse had realized that she had recently given birth; if only her obstetrician had recognized her symptoms during her pregnancy as the onset of cardiomyopathy; if only the medical community hadn't spent the better part of two centuries ignoring and dismissing female cardiac patients such that even in the year 2004 the manifestations of heart disease in women remained underresearched and misunderstood.