During one of my weeks at clinical I was able to follow around a nurse Bethany as she was taking care of her some of her patients. It was a great learning experience because she taught me about IV pumps and blood transfusions, which I didn’t have much exposure to. One of her patient’s was having a procedure done and was somnolent for most of the process. As we were wrapping up, we just needed to grab a quick set of vital signs when the patient woke up and was a little agitated.
The patient insisted that he wouldn’t let us take his vitals until he had spoken to his wife, someone who wasn’t there. Bethany and another nurse tried to convince him to just let them take his vitals really quick but he was adamant he needed to speak to her. Eventually the nurse recognized that it would be the only way we could reasonably get this done and asked me to help him call his wife on the phone by his bedside as she needed to get started on another task.
I tried to hand the patient the corded phone but he said he didn’t think to dial the number himself and asked me to do it for him. He read me off the number for his wife but when the phone finished ringing, I got the answering machine for the hospital’s radiology department. That’s not right, I thought to myself, and I tried to dial the number again, confirming the number with the patient. It was only after my second or third try of reaching radiology that I thought maybe you had to dial a number to signal it was an outgoing call and went to ask Bethany about it. She confirmed my suspicion and told me to hit nine first before the rest of the number to get the number to go outside the hospital.
With the patient becoming a little more frustrated, I tried again and was glad when I heard a man’s voice answer the phone. “Good evening”, I said, “can I speak to Linda*”?
“There’s nobody hear with that name.”
“Oh, are you sure?”
“Yes, I think you have the wrong number.”
“Yeah, I must, sorry to bother you.”
I told the patient that a man answered the phone number he gave me and asked if he was sure he gave me the right number. The man insisted he knew his wife’s phone number and grew more frustrated. I assumed I dialed it wrong and read off the numbers as I tried again. I got the same result and now not only the patient was frustrated so was the man on the phone I was speaking on the phone with. The patient kept insisting that he had the right number and the man on the phone – the man with supposedly his wife’s phone number- asked me to stop calling him.
I remember the room starting to feel pretty warm at this point and feeling pretty stupid that I couldn’t figure out how to help this guy with something as easy as dialing a phone number. I felt like I was failing, that clearly this was something important to the patient but I was struggling. But I figured it was better to just ask the nurse at this point rather than just keep making the matter worse for everyone.
Bethany was pretty understanding about the whole situation walked with me back into the room. One of the first things she did was look at the white board facing the bed and asked the patient his wife’s name. At the bottom corner of the board there was a small contact info section that had Linda and another person’s name and phone number. But the number for Linda was different than what the patient kept telling me it was. I couldn’t believe it. I felt dumb. The solution was five feet away from me the entire time. Linda ended up picking up the phone on the third ring. It was significantly easier to call her after I had the right phone number.
Obviously, in the future, I can learn from what happened and have a little more knowledge the next time I have a situation like this. After speaking to his wife, the patient was cooperative and even let us start taking his vitals while he was still on the phone.
I was able to make a different in my patient’s life not because I knew what to do or because I could do everything right. I made a difference because I knew I wasn’t in this alone. I knew where to go for help. I was able to make a difference because I kept trying.
