Shannon is the nurse who saved my life twice. The first time I had just come onto the floor from surgery to remove an abscess from my jaw bone. Shannon immediately came to my bedside to hook me on the monitor and checked my vitals, which had been absolutely fine at that point. Had she allowed herself to be distracted for only a moment, I would be dead. My blood pressure was 50/30, due to septic shock. When she finished manually rechecking my blood pressure I asked her to switch off the light as I was very tired and wanted to take a nap. She instead brought her supervisor to my room and a rapid response was called. If she had not come to immediately check on me, I would have died.
After 2 stints in ICU, I was again on the med/surg floor and was lucky to have Shannon as my nurse again. In the hours after the super bowl, Shannon checked my vitals. I was pretty foggy at the time, but she called a rapid response and I heard a nurse tell the resident and another nurse that my blood pressure was 40/25. Shannon and the resident stayed with me. Several nurses tried everything they could to keep me alive. At one point the resident ordered an IV bag of Albumin. Unknown to me I had an allergy to latex and my throat swelled shut and my face blew up, so on top of everything else, Shannon had to deal with an anaphylactic response. If it wasn't for Shannon I wouldn't be alive.