6:52 PM, Room 6018, Heart rate: 152bpm
Sid always chewed gum while he gave report. It was a mindless habit. It occupied
him.
He was large, overweight actually. He filled up the rolling armchair. He sat and
chewed and talked his way through each patient on the monitor screens. He was
good at what he did. As monitor techs go, perhaps the best. But he was bored.
He was 42, divorced, and spoke with little inflection. He was putty faced with
a mop of hair and heavy glasses. His fingers were thick and moved woodenly over
the keyboard. I liked him, though. He was professional and detached; a measure
short of cynical. It seemed part of the job description, the mindset. I had
learned it from him.
There were three screens laid out with EKG blocks to monitor the heart rhythms
of up to 36 patients. We covered several floors. Tonight we were at 33, pretty
full. Each block was a little chaos of colors, differentiating patient name,
room number, thresholds, heart rate, Irritating, bonging alarms. The EKG lines
worked their way from left to right. More often than not they were irregular,
fatly curved instead of sharp, undertoned with fatigue, geriatric.
It was shift change. The phones were ringing. Nurses frantically paired up;
bedside talk, reciting numbers, conveying patient details, wearing game-faces,
exchanging subtle glances packed with non-verbals. There was a frenzied
movement of equipment, a hand-off of pagers, a cacophony of voices, noises,
commands, methodical report. Clusters of white coats passed; intense young
faces, posturing, jockeying for position. Families stood by in silence,
hovering in doorways with drained and anxious faces.
