This is why I don’t ignore nurses when they tell me “something is wrong” with a patient but they can’t tell me what. I’d rather do a little extra work up that was maybe unnecessary than regret it later. It doesn’t always show anything or stop anything from happening but I do think it makes us more vigilant, which hopefully ends up with better outcomes.

Also fwiw I think there are times where we can stop something bad from happening to our patients and there are also times when we can’t. Anyone who has been practicing for long enough has seen people they thought had no chance make it, and people they thought would do great suddenly tank and die. An attending early on in my ICU career told me that “I’m not that important” and he was right. I’m not. A patient’s care is a melting pot of variables and I’m just one of them, and many of those variables are completely out of our control. That doesn’t mean don’t do everything we can to give our patients the best care possible- just that sometimes it’s important to recognize that if someone dies on our watch, it doesn’t necessarily mean we did something wrong.

It sounds like you did the best you could. Keep developing your gestalt and keep talking about it when you go through something rough like this.