Helpless on the Holidays

It happens every major holiday. Families pop in to visit Grandma or Grandpa for the first time in Lord knows when, and find them dead, mostly dead, or broken and bruised alone in their house.

This was the story of my first patient Thanksgiving morning a few years back. She was in her 80s and had slipped in the bathroom, injuring her hip. She couldn't get up and was stuck there on the floor in a puddle of water for three days. Family tried to call that morning for the holiday, and when she didn't answer got their first clue that something was wrong.

She was unconscious and her skin was cold with a bluish hue. Her core temperature was 88 degrees Farneheit from lying naked in cool water for so long, and she had several areas of obvious skin breakdown. Our first goal after the first round of assessments was to warm her up. This cold she was far beyond the therapeutic abilities of our blanket warmer.

"How about the Arctic Sun?" Someone offered.

The Arctic Sun is one of our favorite little pieces of cutting edge technology. Consisting of large gel pads that connect to a machine that circulates water through them, we normally use it to induce hypothermia in patients post cardiac arrest to help preserve brain function. But since you can control the goal temperature, you could hypothetically use it to warm someone up. We ER nurses are very much fans of trying new things, and it seemed like it was worth a try.

So we placed the temperature probe by her breathing tube to record accurate core temperature, fitted the various gel pads to cover the majority of her body surface, and set the temp goal for a more comfortable 96. As I set her up for her transfer to ICU, I knew her odds were dismal. It's not very often that an elderly patient who is brought in critical condition walks back out again. In my subconscious, I assumed in a couple of days she would most likely be gone.

At work a month or so later, I was busy at the nurses' station with some paper work when one of my colleagues came up to me.

"Hey remember that Hypothermia patient we had on Thanksgiving? She's in room 5 for something minor, but she's doing great! She's totally with it!"

I'll count that one as a Holiday miracle.

Moral of the story:

Don't let your mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, uncle, aunt, etc be one of our annual sad holiday stories, because no one pays them attention except on special occasions. On that note -

Happy Thanksgiving!