Pt presents drunk and allegedly made some suicidal statements he now denies. Pt sobers up. Psychiatrist sees pt, believes him when he says he was just “talking nonsense” when he made them. Psychiatrist prescribes anxiety meds and antidepressant. Pt goes home and fills the Rx’s. Then proceeds to OD on all the pills he just received. Comes back to ER obtunded and gets tubed.
Oops.

Let’s see, you just suffered blindness in 1/2 your visual field and the CT of your head shows something ominous needing more work up. You however don’t want to be admitted because you won’t be able to smoke your 2 packs a day in the hospital and don’t like nicotine patches.
Addiction has made you a complete and utter idiot.

So I’ve been in too many codes where it is complete chaos. Sometimes the difficulty is figuring out what’s going on. Most often though, it is other problems. Someone doesn’t know where the extra epi is, no one can get a line, the compressions are not good enough, someone can’t set up the infusion pump, etc. Obviously this does nothing good for the patient’s prognosis.
Recently though, I had the pleasure of being in a code that went swimmingly well. The compressions were good, the meds went in quickly, the pump and monitor were fine and the defibrillator pads were hooked up in five seconds! Hallelujah!
The other thing is that this person actually responded to the treatments.
However, as too often happens, even when things go right they also go wrong. Even well-run codes don’t necessarily work and patients die. As they say sometimes, “shit just happens and then you die”.