Tag Archives: Emergency Medicine

Three Patients

19 Tuesday Dec 2017

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Another publication from way back when, detailing the insanity of intern year.

 

At 0622, I walked into the resident room. I pulled on my scrubs and clipped my stethoscope, cellphone and trauma shears to my waist. A patient had joked I looked like a gunslinger from an old western. I felt more like Don Quixote, with my makeshift strapped on armor, trying to do good against all odds.

 

I walked into my shift at 0645, into the busy urban Emergency Department I called home. The night intern signed out to me. The sign out included the usual scattering of the very sick, and the very intoxicated, everyone else had gone home before dawn broke.

 

I walked up to see a new patient that EMS had just rolled in, an elderly Vietnam vet who’d fallen and couldn’t get up. He was terrified he’d broken his back. I reassured him and his wife as best I could without lying to him. Leaving, I got a call from the nurse of one of my patients. “The woman in 19 wanted to leave, is at triage.”

 

Stale alcohol wafted through the air. As I tried to make sure she was sober, she grew irate. When I asked her to walk, she huffed and took two steps to me with her middle finger raised, stopping right before she slammed into me. I went to print her discharge to a commentary telling me where I could put it.

 

I’ve been a resident in Emergency Medicine for two months now, but I’ve already begun to find those encounters blasé. As I bade her good health and walked back, the veteran called me over. He and his wife seemed terrified so I reassured them and explained what to expect as the day went on.

 

I walked over to go see my new patient and I got a call “Bed 14 wants to talk to you”. As I approached, I saw the half-naked, well built, angry looking fellow I’d been signed out and had a sinking feeling. He cursed at me with a fluency I’ve grown to expect, with his sweet, old mother sitting next to him holding his dirty shoes and clothes on her lap. “Let me go!” he spat, as I kept my distance, a muscular technician at my side. As I tried to examine him, his anger grew. He ripped off his C-collar in one mighty swipe and his blood pressure cuff in another. As he was rising from bed, security officers materialized, as if beamed down from Star Trek. Under their gentle, watchful gaze, I finished examining him and finding him sober, discharged him.

 

As my day progressed, I saw a handful more patients, dispositioning them with the eagerness and ineptitude of an August intern.

 

The veteran ended up having a compression fracture, and as I helped put him in his back brace, he thanked me effusively. As I said goodbye, he looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t know how you do it. I heard that woman curse at you, and I saw how badly that kid wanted to rip your head off. How do you do it? All this pain and suffering day in and day out would destroy me…” I smiled, shrugged my shoulders and said “It comes with the job.”

 

As I walked away I was forced to confront my flippant answer. I’m an intern, two months into residency and already I’ve lost a handful of patients. I see terrible violence every day and as I dip into and out of people’s lives I feel a faint echo of their misery. To survive as I tilt my lance at windmills, I wear a coat of emotional armor that allows me to take the hits and keep working. My armor is adaptive: titanium when I see angry, intoxicated patients and cotton when I see scared sick people.

 

Then I sign out, walk out of the Emergency Department’s bright neon lights and try to leave it all behind me. As I get home, to a loving significant other and puppy, I take a deep breath as I walk in the front door, take off the armor, piling it carefully by the door. After all, I work again tomorrow.

“Stayin’ Alive”

12 Tuesday Dec 2017

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A variation of this was published in a peer reviewed medical journal. Another walk down memory lane. My first emergency medicine journal publication, and my last publication of the end of medical school.

The paramedic’s bullet was short and to the point. “40 something year old woman. Found down, possibly after a fall. Unresponsive in the field. Bradycardic to the 40s. Protecting her airway initially, but now desating to the 80s. Barely got an IV.”

As a fourth year med student who had seen a bunch of codes, I still felt a frisson of excitement when codes came through the door. After all codes for me represented Emergency Medicine- no information, a deathly sick patient, lots of adrenalin and a healthy dose of fear.

I stood by my resident’s side as she induced and intubated the patient. As the pearly whites of her vocal cords came into view and I saw the tube go through it, we all released the breath we had subconsciously been holding. A dose of Atropine raised her heart rate and she seemed to stabilize. I walked to the door of her room pulling off my gloves as I went- I had patients to see after all.

As I pulled off the gloves, alarms began to sound. Her heart rate was beginning to drop again. My resident met my eyes, and said just one word- “Compressions.” Within seconds of her having given the order, I was at it. I had done compressions on dozens of people- and each time I did, I recalled my BLS instructor teaching us to compress to the beat of Stayin’ Alive, since the song had a beat of 100 a minute. He said it also worked with Another One Bites the Dust- a connection that was too morbid for me at the time.

So as Stayin’ Alive played in my brain, I pushed down on her breastbone, hard and fast, and I felt something pop beneath my crossed hands. I was breaking her ribs as I compressed her chest in a violent, last ditch attempt to beat her heart for her. Each time I broke ribs I found myself pausing for a moment- pausing to apologize and acknowledge the violence I was inflicting. Then, I remembered that if I didn’t do it my patient would never hear any apologies again. So I fell into my terrible cadence, in my own little world with Stayin’ Alive for a soundtrack curiously disconnected from my humanity and the sadness of the situation.

Around me there was a blur of motion. The nurses were drawing up and giving med after med. My resident was splashing betadine on the woman’s chest right next to my hands and blindly trying for a subclavian line. I momentarily felt a stab of fear as she stabbed the patient in her chest millimeters from my crossed hands, but I made sure my compresisons never faltered. The patient’s one tenuous IV blew, and suddenly there were people all around me with needles stabbing away. And through it all I was humming “Staying Alive” under my breath. Each time I lifted and dropped my shoulders, about 100 times a minute, I saw her chest lift off and drop back onto the bed, her breasts, exposed to the world, flop up and down, her head jerk up and down, and her arms lift and fall just a little. For a second her movements gave her the illusion of life- an illusion I was creating. I knew the statistics, knew that more than likely she wouldn’t survive- but as I compressed I hoped. Sweat was running down my arms as I worked, landing on her chest and mixing with her blood as I kept to my terrible cadence.

Around me the needles were ineffective. Nothing was working. The nurses, who almost never miss, were cursing in frustration as they got a line only to have it blow a second later. My resident and two attending physicians were trying to get central lines, and from their lips too came soft curses.

As my arms began to tire, one of the nurses switched with me. Her light svelte frame was perched precariously on her toes as she began the same cadence trying to beat this woman’s heart for her. It seemed like seconds later that I was switching back with the nurse. As she did her final compressions and switched with me I heard the strains of “Stayin’ Alive” fading away softly under her breath.

We worked for what seemed an eternity. My arms pushed of their own accord. Thirty minutes after we began, my attending called it. “Time of death, 1040”. I walked out of the room yet again pulling off gloves- this time slick with blood. Having gotten sufficiently desensitized after dozens of unsuccessful codes, I walked out with a sigh and a stab of sadness at the life lost. In a few months I would be an intern, and a year or two after that I’d be expected to run a code. But for the here and now I was just a medical student, and my only job was to learn. So I learned from my patient, the woman who had died. I learned yet again that I couldn’t always save my patients.

There was a chart on the rack to be seen, and I walked to the room. As I walked into the room, trying to leave my previous patient and the violence I had inflicted upon her behind me, I smiled at the next patient with Stayin’ Alive still playing in my mind. All I could hope was that perhaps this patient would.

“You Set the Tone”

05 Tuesday Dec 2017

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Another walk down memory lane, as I finished my ED months and did my medicine sub-internship. A good reminder, that when all is said and done, you do set the tone and you choose the job. I still vacillate between the emotional teflon being extra thick and it being porus enough that the insanity of work spills into my personal life. And I probably will keep doing that forever.

 

“Don’t ever say you’re sorry. See, there’s two kinds of doctors… there’s the kind that gets rid of their feelings, and the kind that keeps them. If you’re gonna keep your feelings, you’re gonna get sick from time to time – that’s just how it works. People come in here and they’re sick and dying and bleeding, and they need our help. Helping them is more important than how we feel.  But it’s still a pain the ass sometimes. Sometimes, I just want to quit and do somethin’ else.”

-Mark Greene, ER

 

I’ve realized recently that there are a few things medical school teaches you nothing about. There’s the fabled four year curriculum that all neophytes believe will make you into an educated, caring, considerate and capable physician. And then there’s the reality that most of what it is to really be a physician is learned in the “unwritten curriculum”, the curriculum you learn from watching the residents, attending’s and nurses. Handling death, seeing suffering and being unable to do anything about it, and how to handle the abuse that a day in the hospital sometimes throws at you- all of these are things you figure out on your own, and hope you’re doing right.

Today, the Match list opened. I’m going to put in my list of programs I want to go to and in March, I find out where I go. And then on July 1st, I become an Emergency Physician- terrified, marginally capable and hopefully guided as I try to take care of people. I’ve spent a lot of time recently watching season after season of ER, and I’ve come to realize something terrifying.

Three and a half years of medical school have hardened me. They’ve acted like a forge, providing tremendous heat and a constant pounding to beat out the ‘imperfections’ and to expose me to the wonders and terrors of clinical medicine. They’ve taken a humanistic person who read Wordsworth, Sarte, and Dostovesky and replaced him with someone deeply familiar with the PERC rule and the CHADS2. I’ve become capable of taking care of patients to some degree, I walk with the strut of someone comfortable with much of daily patient care. My training has helped me save a couple of lives already, and will likely be responsible for saving many more over my career. But I can’t help but wonder what I’ve lost along the way.

The last patient I did CPR on died. I had my hands poised over her sternum when time of death was called. I realized later, that when I left I walked out without a second thought as to the life that had just ended, moving on efficiently to the next task.

More than anything else that terrifies me. I’ve never been overtly or overly emotional, but recently in the hospital it’s as though I’ve developed this protective Teflon coating that blunts both the great saves and the terrible losses. I can’t imagine functioning in a busy Emergency Department without it- the fear would probably render me catatonic, but the existence of it makes me wonder if I’ve become the soulless automaton I swore I would never become- the soulless automaton so far from the physicians identified by Mark Greene and John Carter.

As my mind wanders down this tangent, I’m reminded of another patient I’d seen that same day. He was an elderly gentleman, a veteran of World War II and Vietnam. A patrician gentleman with a regal bearing, I was admitting him to the hospital for pulmonary edema. When I told him, this man who’d survived the landing on Normandy and pushed on despite seeing scores of his friends die, broke down in tears. He was terrified he was losing his independence to a disease that crept on insidiously with age. My heart broke a little inside, because he reminded me of my own grandfather, a 85 year old general who hated the hospital. So I sat with him for ten minutes just talking, and holding back tears.

I do set the tone, I do decide how I’m going to see and manage and handle the emotional onslaught contained in the walls of an Emergency Department every day. And despite how useful my emotional armor is, I think I need to continue to live in fear of it. The day I grow to like it too much, is I think the day that I should hang up my stethoscope.

May that day be far, far away.

 

Emergency Medicine from the eyes of a novice

18 Sunday May 2014

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Having a week of my Emergency Medicine experience under my belt, I’m sure I totally qualify as a veteran.

With my novice eyes-here are some observations and thoughts.

1. ER Docs aren’t your family docs or internists: Just yesterday I saw a lady with a slightly elevated blood pressure who’d been sent in by her visiting nurse because she hadn’t taken her medicine and needed a checkup. Talking to the patient revealed that she needed to follow up with her PCP who she’d not been able to see in a few months, and the nurse had figured that the ER would do that for her. The thing is the ER is a place for emergency care. If you’re having a heart attack, a stroke, delivering your baby, got hit by a baseball bat you need the ER. If you need a checkup and the wait times are too long at your PCP then the ER isn’t the best place for you. Between the traumas, the people with heart attacks and strokes and all the rest you’re not going to get the care you need.

2. Emergency Medicine is based on treating or ruling out emergencies: If you’re entering your EM rotation your attending wants two things from you on the differential- the bad things that could kill you and what it probably is. They’re far more worried about your chest pain being a heart attack and ruling it out before they send you home, consequently what could likely be something benign like a strained muscle can be treated once we’re sure it’s not a heart attack.

3. Not every patient in the ED will have (or needs) a diagnosis: As gratifying as most physicians find it to get an answer they can hang their hats on, the ER is often not the place for it. You’d like to, in an ideal world, figure out what’s going on with a patient but realistically when there’s a 3.5 hour waiting and 40 patients outside in the waiting room with a couple of traumas rolling in and the guy in bed 4 actively seizing you prioritize. That ends up leaving some of the things that need to be worked up on an outpatient basis as just that- waiting to be worked up outpatient. The ER is an incredibly expensive place to receive medical care as is the hospital in general so ED physicians try to judiciously use resources.

4. Sometimes people will hate you: The ER is a busy place, and there are always people you’ll be admitting. Often when you’re admitting someone to a service the resident on staff may be flabbergasted that your history and details didn’t include a more detailed family, social or physical exam- and that’s fair from their perspective. The problem comes, from an ED perspective a lot of those questions and answers won’t change an initial management. Secondly, anyone who’s causing your already busy workload to increase is likely not going to be your favorite person. For that reason, you may have the odd consultant who doesn’t jump for joy each time you call. That’s okay though. As long as the patient ends up being cared for.

5. Emergency Medicine is heavily weighted towards management:  Something I learned the hard way in a simulation session is that EM is a heavy management specialty. The traditional paradigm is for one to get a history, do a physician, collect an assessment and make a plan. In EM- you start with a plan then you keep going. And you modify your plan as you go. It seems rather obvious but if someone is coming in with chest pain that could be a heart attack you don’t want to spend 30 minutes getting a history and physical while the guy is actively losing heart muscle. Obvious it may be- it’s often challenging to make the switch from sitting and talking before you’re touching the patient and doing things to them. That said- 1 week in I’m already beginning to talk to, examine and treat my patients simultaneously.

 

In case you were curious I’m going to go into EM. Aka:

12 medical specialty stereotypes