"Clear!"

I have always wanted to yell that, well at least from the time when I was 7 and ER premiered. Today I got to do it for real! It was on my TEE/cardioversion guy. At first today when I went to the tele room when I got on the floor his heart rate looked like it had flipped back into normal sinus rhythm which I was pretty bummed about...then we realized that the girls in the tele room printed a tele strip of another one of my patients. Low and behold when I got the right strip the patient was still in afib/aflutter. He was the sweetest old man, late 80s, and asked me more then once today if I was going to go with him down for the procedure and stay with him through it. (Duh! I was a bit excited about it.)

Anyways, apparently this doctor, who is usually grumpy was super impressed with me. He talked me through the whole procedure, we were able to see the mitral valve prolapse, he had the tech pause the monitor multiple times to show and explain things to me. Then when we got to the end of the procedure when we were going to to the cardio version he turned to me and said "you want to shock him back into rhythm," (thinking to myself "do I want to shock him into rhythm, is the sky blue?!?") I got a huge grin and said "yes." He walked me through the steps of how to do it, then I said "all clear," then wabam! Back into rhythm baby!

Here is a strip of a heart rate in afib/aflutter:

Here is a strip in normal sinus:

Today was definitely a rocking last day of clinicals! :) (Now there are no more clinicals until mid September...how sweet is that?!?)