My first CPR experience: Beautiful Sinus Tachycardia

It is not clear to me why all nurses cannot support each other. I mean, why is it so hard to try to make another nurses life easier. We are all in the same boat after all. In my experience I have learned some nurses will go the extra mile for you and some will not. Some nurses in particular do the exact opposite and seem to want to do nothing to help you but in fact they may want to impede your happiness. On this particular night the ER nurses seemed to have beef with the ICU nurses. They just kept sending up sick sick sick patients one after another. This one patient had coded twice in the ER and they were nice enough to temporarily stabilize them and then ship em to us! Well I happened to be on the opposite side of the unit from this particular patient but from the looks of it I would be meeting them soon since I attend all code BLUEs while on orientation.
Since the patient was declining quickly I decided to go over to see if I could help. There was a crash cart in the doorway and a Respiratory therapist with a doppler trying to get a femoral pulse to get an ABG. hmmmm. I know all of my readers are not medical people but in my experience a doppler is not often needed for a femoral pulse unless it is during a code situation. After trying for a bit the therapist gives up and I am becoming increasingly more uncomfortable with the situation. I mean PEA anyone? So i decide to check on the other nurses and just as I round the corner they decide to call the code! Alright man some action! I grab some gloves and hurry in the room for some face time. I am standing around helping when I can when I notice a bunch of nurses looking in from the hallway. Then I notice their name tags and see that they are new graduates. What?! fresh meat! So I am thinking I am all high and mighty with my big 1 year of experience and I’m trying to be all involved. When suddenly for round 5 of CPR one of these new grads jump in there. Holy moly! I’ve never done that. Geez how embarassing! When the doctor says to hold compressions and the nurse giving CPR asks for relief I jump at the opportunity. The ER doc announces we are only doing one more round and then she is going to call it if we don’t have a rhythm. By this time I am sweating bullets because I am so scared to look dumb while doing CPR. I just keep thinking someone is going to laugh at me for doing it wrong. One of the CPR instructors at work told me one time to do compressions to the beat of the song, “Staying Alive.” So here I am feeling like a rock star compressing along then the doctor says, “HOLD COMPRESSIONS!” I look up to the heart monitor and there it is the most beautiful Sinus Tachycardia I have ever seen and someone says, “Good compressions Melissa you brought him back to life!” The rest of that was a blur. I was on cloud nine. My first time doing compressions and the patient got a heartbeat. It was such a wonderful moment. I will never forget that beautiful rhythm that I compressed back into that lifeless heart.