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She was checking all her patient’s fluid charts when Joyce, the ward cleaner, approached. Joyce had been cleaning 2B’s floors and keeping everything spick and span for over two decades. Hailey had no doubt that at any given time she could eat off the floors safe in the knowledge that no bacteria would dare challenge the cleaner’s authority. Joyce was almost part of the furniture around the ward and was regarded as one of the team.
There was an old adage in nursing. Patients told doctors a little, nurses a lot and the cleaning staff everything. And a good nurse knew it. Joyce was her first port of call when one of the parents was reticent with information.
‘There’s an alarm going off next door.’ Joyce jabbed her thumb towards the high-dependency bay. ‘There’s no one in there.’
An urgent beeping from a saturation monitor worked its way into her consciousness. She realised then that it had been going off for a while. Hailey frowned. There was no one there? She’d subconsciously blocked the noise out, knowing it was Rosemary’s bay and the other nurse was supposed to be there.
The alarm persisted and Hailey thanked Joyce, making her way next door. She didn’t hurry, knowing that it would probably be just a dislodged probe. The bay was empty of any parents and also empty of Rosemary, as Joyce had indicated. She wasn’t supposed to leave the high-dependency bay without getting someone to take her place. The alarm was coming from Henry’s bed and Hailey strolled over, still unconcerned.
But when she got there, it was immediately obvious the alarm was for real. The sats monitor was recording Henry’s oxygen saturations as seventy per cent and one look at Henry confirmed the dire figure. He was flailing his arms around, gasping for air, like a fish out of water, his lips and peripheries tinged with blue, sweat beading his forehead.
‘Oh, no,’ Hailey muttered. Was Henry’s trachy blocked or had he just worked himself into a state, exacerbating his malacia? She hit the emergency call button on the wall near the end of the cot with one hand as she manoeuvred the cot side down with the other.
Callum, who had returned to the ward to fill out the paperwork for a pending admission, was at the nurses’ station when the distinctive tone of the emergency call went off. He looked at the nurse call board that displayed all the bed numbers and quickly located the source of the emergency.
He strode into the high-dependency bay to find a very worried Hailey frantically suctioning Henry’s trachy. One look at the little boy’s panic-filled gaze and cyanosed lips was enough to confirm the urgency of the situation.
‘What happened?’ he demanded, yanking the resus bag off the wall and twisting on the oxygen meter it was connected to, satisfied to hear the hiss of gas inflating the bag.
‘Not sure. I think he must have plugged his trachy,’ Hailey said, withdrawing the suction catheter from the artificial airway. ‘It’s no use. I can’t pass it. It must be completely blocked.’
Callum nodded, trusting her assessment. ‘We’re going to have to replace it.’
The alarm continued to trill in the background, the tone getting lower as Henry’s saturations continued to plummet further. Fifty, forty-nine, forty-eight. The little boy’s colour was getting worse the more oxygen deprived he became.
Hailey glanced at Callum, her heartbeat thundering in her ears. A red flush was creeping up her neck. She hesitated a split second before she nodded.
‘What’s the matter?’ Yvonne demanded as two other nurses, including a very pale-looking Rosemary, joined them.
‘Get the resus trolley,’ Hailey ordered, her gaze not leaving her patient as she fumbled with the emergency box of supplies kept on Henry’s bedside cabinet.
‘I’ll dilate the stoma,’ Callum said as he snipped the tapes that secured the useless trachy in place. ‘You place the airway.’
Hailey nodded as she handed him the trachy dilators. The noise of the alarm and the controlled panic that surrounded her as Yvonne barked orders and nurses performed their much practised roles faded as adrenaline honed her instincts. She was aware only of Callum and Henry as they worked in tandem to secure the little boy a patent airway.
Callum whipped out the old trachy and inserted the dilators into the hole in Henry’s neck. Hailey, her fingers trembling, ripped open the packaging of a new trachy and deftly inserted the sturdy, plastic airway into the tract. She held it in place for Callum as he attached the resus bag and gently puffed some breaths into Henry’s lungs.
The little boy pinked up almost immediately, the tone on the sats monitor getting higher and higher as his oxygen saturations climbed rapidly back into the nineties. Henry started to cry as panic was replaced with relief. The whole episode had obviously terrified him.
