Proud Employee of Strong Hospital

I got some funny stories to tell y'all.

First, on the Surgical Intensive Care Unit over the summer, there was a mis-hap. I was working down the hall in the Respiratory Unit when the over-head bells went off signaling that there was a utility alert...basically a potential fire. Two seconds later, the code went off for a confirmed fire in the Surgical ICU. My first thought was "Which idiot nurse burned the popcorn in the microwave". It happens (sometimes to me....). Anyway, two seconds after that, there was an overhead page for Dr. Enis (name has been changed because I forgot his real name) to report to the Surgical ICU stat. Dr. Enis is the chief surgeon for our level 1 Burn-Trauma ICU.

Side Note: There are Surgical, Medical, Cardiac, Bone Marrow Transplant, Burn-Trauma, Pediatric, and Neonatal ICUs at Strong Hospital. I work in the Respiratory Unit and Medical ICU. Each ICU cares for about 16 to 20 patients at a time. Neonatal can have 70+ preemies with them at any given time. Strong has about 700 beds in it.

I send one of the respiratory therapists working with me down the hall to see what is going on. Well, it would seem that some poor old woman who had just had major abdominal surgery and was still hooked up to the ventilator had a bad thing happen to her. For some reason, there was a short in the wire warming the oxygen that flows down from the ventilator, down the tubing, and into the woman. This short caused a fire, which is bad in the presence of 100% O2. The end result was that the ventilator turned into a flame thrower, each breath the ventilator gave became a flame shooting out of the tubing, burnung the woman's face-neck-shoulder-arm area. She lived and was okay. I think the hospital settled with her.

Then, a few days ago, some nurse on a floor thought that she would be nice to one of her patients who was complaining about being cold. She put a blanket in our industrial strength microwaves and warmed it up. Twice. After placing the blanket on the patient, the blanket, and subsequently the patient, went up in flames. I think that this was only a minor toasting rather than the full-on torching that the Surgical ICU did.

Then, this winter, Strong found out that there was legionella in the water system. Legionella has the nasty habit of killing people who are sick and get infected by it. So far, only 3 cases have appeared. Two made it up to me in the Medical ICU. One made it out alive. The third isn't sick enough to have to come up to the Medical ICU. 66% survival rate ain't bad....?

And now, it seems that one of the organ procurement orginizations that Strong uses for obtaining organs for transplant is being investigated for allegedly buying organs from funeral homes. A note to the non-medical types: dead organs don't work very well. Niki has a bit about this on her legal blog (Sui Generous....to the right side).

Funny thing is....Strong Hospital is still one of the top teaching hospitals (associated with the University of Rochester) in the nation.

I'm gonna ask for a raise.