Emergency in the psych unit

I've been wanting to blog about New Years Resolutions, past and present and it says much about the state of affairs that it is 2 1/2 weeks into January and I haven't yet done so. One of the present ones is to start working out. I haven't worked out in 6 months, not since we returned from vacation, decided to move, decided to sell the house and cancelled our membership at the gym. My aim is to build up slowly: first pilates for minimum 15 minutes 3X a week and add on from there.

Yesterday I found a new motivation to start some cardio workout. The ruscusitation alarm went off in the ER and the designated rescusitation nurse looked at his beeper and asked someone to come along. I had time so I volunteered. The emergency was in the psych. ward. My colleague shouldered the backpack with the defibrillator, I grabbed the clipboard and the oxygen canister and we took off running. The psych unit is a long hike away from the ER. Our path took us through the ER, down 2 floors to the basement, along half the basement corridor, and into the culvert, an underground passage that connects the main hospital with the patient hotell on one hand and the building that houses psych on the other. Once there we had to run up a flight of stairs again to the locked door of psych. My colleague is an athlete. Only one of the physicians on the team who had a kick bike was able to keep up with him, the other two and myself were definitly dropping behind. I was winded when we arrived, and thought: I really need to start working out!

It all went well. As the psych personell unlocked for us, my colleague asked: is it an arrest (cardiac)? No was the answer, and we knew we could slow down. I never found out what had happened, but the patient was sitting on the floor and anesthesia, who had gotten there before us were already working on him. The attending medical doctor stayed with the anesthesia nurse, the rest of us were dismissed.