Last week I had my volunteer orientation in an ICU; this week I get to do my first full volunteer shift there. The prospect is somewhat petrifying. I've volunteered in hospitals before, and a fair amount of my current and former jobs have involved interacting with outpatients, but I've only ever really worked with people who are doing fairly well. I mean, many of them were terminally ill, but if they were in a position to be talking to me, they were stable. But last week, I saw ventilators, I saw notes that this patient or that patient was unresponsive, I saw code carts on what seemed like every corner...
I'm a Nervous Nellie. Everyone who knows me learns that pretty quickly. I'm looking forward to doing this--while two of my three main career interests would involve working with outpatients, the third might not, and I'd like to get experience interacting with people who are actually, you know, sick. That being said, I worry about how to react in the event of something actually going wrong. For example, if someone becomes unresponsive and I think they're having a heart attack, do I hit the code button? Or the staff assist button? Or do I run screaming into the hallway? Now, probably what would actually happen is that some sort of alarm from one of the hypothetical patient's machines would start going crazy and people would rush in before I figured out what to do anyway.
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