Health

They see a nurse having what sounds like a normal conversation with a patient who has good numbers on his monitor. Then s/he runs from the bedside, grabs the code cart, yells down the hall to call the code in that room, cracks the cart and starts to administer forced oxygen to the patient just as the numbers start to be not good and the code team piles in. How did s/he know?

The patient might be an educated person who is speaking correctly but like he's speaking ESL. Or maybe he's a little dusky around the lips, or maybe she's suddenly talking complete ragtime. Or maybe they stop in mid sentence and say "I'm scared." Maybe the breathing pattern is a little strange. No machine is going to pick any of this up, all the numbers say the patient is doing well. The sooner a patient can be treated, the more likely s/he is to survive a crash.

So the next time you see a nurse doing chitchat with a patient, know that the wheels are turning.