Alarm Fatigue

A Problem for Caregivers, Too

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Photo created by author, Hillary Ramos, and Midjourney AI

The sun had barely begun to peek through a crack in the window shade when I heard the familiar sound of my daughter vomiting in her hospital bed. Terrified that she might choke and that she might further aggravate her lungs, I rushed from the sofa bed to her crib to flip her onto her side. I began suctioning the vomit from her nose and mouth. Talk about a rough start to the morning.

What was initially supposed to be a four day hospital stay had become a two week stay due to uncontrolled seizure activity and aspiration pneumonia. At this point, we had endured a week-long stay in the PICU, several days of intubation and ventilation, and endless rounds of rescue medications. We were tired and desperate to avoid taking steps backwards in her recovery.

As I worked quickly to clear her airway, my eyes darted toward her monitors. Heart rate climbing. I needed help, but I couldn’t reach the seizure button or the phone without leaving her side. Just as I cleared the last of the vomit from her mouth and nasal passages, I heard the familiar dinging of the alarm on her vitals monitor. Her heart rate was too high.

After pushing the rail of the crib up for safety, I ran to the hall in search of our nurse. There was nobody within eyesight — not our assigned nurse or any of the others. Shift change had just finished; they were all likely working with other patients doing their morning rounds.

I was alone.

I decided to go ahead and start cleaning up my daughter and her bed. Surely someone would be notified soon that our alarm was still going off with her high heart rate, right? As I wiped her body down with a baby wipe, I glanced over my shoulder to see a nurse standing at the nurse’s station just outside our door. As I watched her typing away at her phone with her back turned to us, the alarm dinging grew louder and louder in my ear. 

Did she seriously not hear us? Or did she just not care? 

After several minutes, I finally got my daughter cleaned up and settled, and the final ding of the alarm echoed in my ear. I figured someone had finally heard it and acknowledged it from a computer.

“Surely that means they’ll be in to check on us soon,” I thought to myself.