anecdotes from pharmacy life

It may be awhile until I write Part 3 of my "day in the life of a pharmacy tech" posts. I'm not officially trained in the anteroom for day shift, although I have covered other tech's breaks and lunches and been trained on weekends and second shift. Next week I start my day shift training and then I'll be in the anteroom for several weeks. In the meantime, I'll tell some other experiences of things that happen at work.

There's usually no one working in the clean room after 5:00 pm, so the second shift anteroom tech is the one who has to make any stat IV medications that get ordered. We have a small "stat" hood in the anteroom and do a shortened version of the garbing and scrubbing when we make things in there. Medications made in the stat hood are only good for 24 hours because it's not as sterile of an environment. I had one night of second shift anteroom training before I was on my own. 😒 Once you are familiar with how drips are made and have been trained in the clean room, working in the anteroom is not that difficult, though. The night I was training, I asked the tech I was working with what would happen if I ever had to do a stat open heart, and she said "there will be a pharmacist with you, so it will be fine." Usually when there's heart surgeries, we get everything together and prepare all the drips the day before. Sometimes a patient comes in who needs surgery immediately, or for some other reason the heart team gets called in to do a stat surgery, so we have to be ready for that. I never got a chance to prepare the heart supplies when I was working in the clean room, so I didn't even know what kinds of drips were needed. Soon after I started working second shift in the anteroom, one evening there was a code called in CCU. In the meantime, I went back to the clean room to make my radials (a cocktail of drugs we make every evening to have on hand for the cath lab) and while I was back there one of the pharmacists poked her head in and said "they're taking the patient who coded back to surgery." At the time I didn't know the story, but it was a patient who had open heart surgery about a week prior. Apparently there was a slow bleed that they weren't aware of until he coded that night. On second shift, we have a much smaller staff and that night there was only 3 pharmacists and 2 techs. One of the pharmacists was working in the ER, another was newer than me and hadn't been trained in the clean room yet, and the third was a per diem pharmacist who only works about 3 evenings a week. The per diem pharmacist had to figure out how to enter all the heart orders, and I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to do! I couldn't believe this was happening. Since I didn't know what kinds of drips to make, I waited until the orders were entered and I had labels telling me what they were. There's about 5 different ones and some of the IV bags look exactly the same, so unless a pharmacist watches you, they have to take your word that you put the correct drug and right amount in the bag. Because of who was working that night, no one was with me in the clean room, so I made those drips totally on my own!! It would've been so easy to make a mistake, but I tried to be extremely careful and can honestly say I believe they were made correctly. It took awhile to get everything figured out, but we did it! And the story has a good ending - THE PATIENT LIVED!!

Sometimes we have people come in who are overdoses or have a very grim outlook. It appears like some families want everything possible done for the patient even though the chances of survival are slim. There's times when we are making multiple doses of strong IV medications around the clock for a week, and you know most likely that patient is being kept alive by chemicals. Finally the meds are discontinued and a little while later you might see a litter being wheeled into the morgue, which is a short way down the hall from the pharmacy.

We had someone come in who tried to commit suicide by drinking antifreeze. Another person unintentionally drank formaldehyde. Apparently the patient had a cold, and someone gave it to him, saying it was something to help his cold. Needless to say, he soon began feeling much worse. One night a lady was brought in by EMS and her husband said she had been unresponsive for a day. The husband came in with another lady, who was his girlfriend. To not do anything for a day when someone is unresponsive seems irresponsible at the least and possibly criminal. We hear about these things but never really know the outcome as far as what happens to the people who are potentially responsible.

Working in a hospital opens your eyes to the fact that things can happen so quickly and just like that people's lives are changed. It's made me learn to appreciate what I have now, and not take good health for granted.