Curious George

So the other day, we're all sitting at the nursing station, doing whatever, when all of a sudden a code is called. On our floor.

For some reason we didn't all get that horrified look of startled panic that well-trained professionals and deer-caught-in-headlights get in moments like these. Maybe because the fire alarm has randomly been going off in patient's rooms (without a fire) lately and the fire alarm (at least to me) sounds suspiciously like the code alarm, except, you see, a different color flashes on the call light outside the patient's room, indicating that we should instruct everyone to stop, drop and roll rather than run for the code cart and start CPR on the patient. (Note to JCAHO and state inspectors: I am making this entire story up for fun. Any similarity to real persons, places, and incidents are entirely coincidental and are not intended by this author.)

Also, contrary to what medical shows would have you believe, most people on a medical floor don't just randomly code (notice I said most--flash pulmonary edema ain't called flash pulmonary edema for no reason). A lot of times, if/when a code is called, the code cart has been sitting outside the patient's room ominously for minutes or hours, and whatever has been happening to the patient has been monitored and treatment already initiated, and about a jillion people are already in the room, waiting for It to happen.

But this particular time, well, we all went running (I think it makes us feel like we're doing something useful) and the nurse that got there first took one look at the alert, oriented, independent, ambulatory and relatively young patient standing there out of bed, and at thirty paces we could all hear her say, "DON'T EVER TOUCH THAT BUTTON !!" At which point the priority became to call the operator and cancel the code, lest the code team come crashing onto the floor for no reason.

Suffice it to say the patient was fine, and, in some of the finest reasoning processes I've seen in my years since divinity school, stated, " Well, I was just trying to figure out how to turn on the lights, and I just wanted to see what would happen if I pushed that button." You know, the one at the very top of all the other buttons, the you can only reach if you're standing at the patient bedside on your tippy-toes. The blue one that says CODE. Because, I don't know, maybe s/he thought CODE = LIGHTS, unlike the little switches by the patient bedside and such that say LIGHTS.

I don't know. If I squint to make the word blurry and/or render myself completely blind, I can kind of understand where the patient was coming from, can't you?