ER Nurse
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
But funny enough, about a year ago, I moved. I was in L.A. for 10 years. And I lived in a pretty decent apartment complex right near Hollywood and Western. So I always used to go to Maru and hope that I would run into Monica.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
No juices in this story, but it's a pretty wild one. This doesn't take place in LA. It does take place somewhere else in California. I was working in a pretty busy emergency department. It was a level two trauma center. So we see pretty much all the crazy gunshots, stabbings, car accidents, falls, all of those things.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
It goes from level one to level four. Level one is the highest. So that's your Cedars-Sinai. The main difference between a level one and a level two is that they have neurosurgery 24 hours a day in-house. So if you have a head injury, they can do procedures right then and there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
Whereas level two, they have to bring a neurosurgeon in or they have to fly the patient, depending on their injury, to a different facility.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
okay and then down to level four it just really is resources that are available at that specific facility so this particular hospital was a level two but there were only two trauma centers in the area so we would get a lot of the traumas and the crazy stuff along with just basic medical patients that come in this was around 2017 2018 busy day in the emergency department we had a lot of traumas coming in the waiting room was full but on top of that we have a lot of psychiatric patients
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
that are on a 5150 hold. They're there on the hold for 72 hours for whatever reason, either they're suicidal, homicidal, or gravely disabled, meaning they can't care for themselves. We're kind of responsible for those patients until they get to a psychiatric facility, which sometimes, you know, that can be days that they're in our emergency department.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
So it depends on their level of how violent they are. If you come in and just say, hey, you know, I'm thinking of committing suicide, but they're willing to be there voluntarily, that's That's one thing. Some other patients will be brought in by the cops because they tried to kill their spouse. At that point, we hold them. But some of them are cooperative and they're calm.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
Other patients are a little less calm and we have to end up restraining them physically or we have to sedate them with a chemical restraint. I remember this day we particularly had, I think, probably seven or eight psychiatric patients, which is a lot.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
They will be in our psych rooms and then some of them are in the hallways, but typically they have to be a one-to-one sitter and the person that's watching them has to be within arm's reach in case they try to hurt themselves.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
So we're busy doing our thing throughout the day and the chief medical officer comes to the department and he quickly tells the team, hey, we just received a call that there was a bomb threat made. at the hospital. And we need to evacuate the emergency department immediately. Whoa.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
Does that mean bring them outdoors? Bring everyone. Oh, my God. There could be 50 patients, including the psychiatric patients outside.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
I've worked places where there's been a threat called in and we typically have security teams and the police are always there because of various reasons. But this particular day, he made the decision that we need to evacuate the emergency department. So as ER nurses do, our team figures it out. A lot of times for disasters, we'll put up tents out in the parking lot.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
So the team began assembling the tents and trying to get patients out as quickly and as safely as possible. There may be 50 patients in the department and there's a handful of nurses.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
The worst scenario that you could probably imagine in the emergency department. And we see awful things. So while trying to maintain all of the other patients, getting them out safely, you know, the people that can't walk on their own, the really sick patients, we have to make sure that all of the psychiatric patients are accounted for. So we get them all outside.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
Everything comes together perfectly. There's enough people to watch. We kind of quarantined the psychiatric patients to one area. We had security guards. There were cops there that had responded to the event. Everything seems to be going well. The bomb squad shows up, and they clear the hospital. And we're like, what exactly happened here? Why did we so quickly make this decision?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
So it turns out, luckily, none of the patients were harmed. But the hospital operator, he was off shift, decided to call in a bomb threat. This was a guy that worked at our hospital, calls in the bomb threat to an operator who is his coworker.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
There was really no way to verify this because they didn't release the 911 tape. But the story is that this person called the operator and the operator was like, is this you, Peter? I recognize your voice. And he's like, no, no, it's not me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
So the gentleman who was making the bomb threat apparently had made multiple bomb threats. He had worked at various facilities over the years. He called in a bomb threat to a school, to various different township buildings. So he was calling in bomb threats for many years. They found out that it could have been potentially three or four years prior to this event.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
He was calling in the bomb threat and then showing up to work. I think this day he showed up a few hours later. I don't know if it was a thrill that he got from like being in and out of the chaos.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
I'm sure they're getting numerous calls like, hey, is it safe to come into the hospital? Because I'm sure that word spreads quickly throughout the community. So I don't know what he was getting from that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
I think he got admitted to the jail. The jail ward. Okay. It was a wild day, but that team, I mean, the ER is chaotic all the time, but it shows you how quickly we come together and no matter what the task at hand is, we just do what we have to to keep our patients safe.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
So the patients that were on a ventilator at the time, there's two options. And we do have battery supply outside because we have patients with IV pumps. But you can also manually ventilate them. It's called an ambu bag. So you can just squeeze a bag to give them breaths. I don't remember that being a huge issue. And we have respiratory therapists that will kind of manage that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
But yeah, those are things that go into our head. And we do disaster drills throughout the year and set up the tents and kind of practice what we would do in that scenario. So we truly are prepared at any given time for something like this to happen. It turns out it probably jumped the gun, for lack of a better phrase. We probably didn't need to evacuate, but it was good practice.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
In my 14 years, I've never experienced anything else like it. We're so lucky that you guys exist.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
They're practicing and they can do it. It's a pretty amazing career. You guys are fortunate to be in L.A. where there's so many great hospitals and
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
When I saw the nursing prompt came up, I'm like, I have to submit this story. I mean, I have so many great ones, but that was a very interesting day. And I don't think that anyone that I worked with will ever forget that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
I've seen an apple. I've seen candlesticks. Sure.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II
Wooden candlesticks, though. They didn't choose the wax one. Like a fake decorative candlestick, which then splintered and punctured their colon. So I could talk about, you know, those stories for days.