I'm a nurse and was working with cardiac patients at the time. When I got on my shift, he had a heart monitor on, but he went down for some tests and came back and somehow someone had taken his heart monitor and switched it over to their own patient. (found out later why). No biggie, there was another monitor left, so I called and got him hooked up to that one. I was taking care of other patients and the nurses' aides were getting him set up. I don't know how long they worked on this, but it must've been at least an hour and a half. No matter what they did, it just wouldn't register. It was just a flatline. They were on and off the phone with the monitor tech people and they just kept telling them to do the normal things: change the batteries, shake the batteries, change the leads, shave his chest, reposition it etc. Nothing worked.

So they finally gave up and turned it over to me. I knew how hard they worked to I told the monitor techs we just needed a new monitor. They refused and told me to keep trying. So knowing that this monitor was critical, I had no choice. I worked on this stupid thing for another hour before giving up. I asked for a "floater" monitor (meaning it floats around the hospital) and they refused, insisting that the one I had worked and they didn't have a floater (a lie).

So at this point, this guy hasn't been monitored for like 4 hours. And most of this time I've been ignoring other patients who really needed me. He could've had a heart attack a long time ago and I wouldn't know. So I went from unit to unit seeing if they had an extra monitor. It wouldn't be monitored on our unit, but there would at least be some record of it, which is better than nothing. I finally found one three floors down and I called to get them to assign it to him. You should've heard the women in the monitor department. The woman who answered the phone said to her coworkers "Get a load of this...she wants me to assign him to a monitor on 4 east." and the replies were moans and groans and "How lazy can they be?" and "That lady is crazy". One of them said "You tell her there is nothing wrong with that monitor!" to which I replied "Well, then you tell her, she can come upstairs and fix it!" And she did. She stood there on our unit for another 2 hours trying to get the monitor to do anything. The computer, for whatever reason, wasn't picking up the signal. She finally took off in a huff...so that was pretty satisfying!