| | The baby girl's trachea was torn to shreds thanks to weeks of ridiculously high ventilator settings and several days of steroids. She was taken emergently to the OR the afternoon I was on-call for tracheal repair (and listed by the anesthesiologists as a ASA 5E). She wasn't expected to survive. And yet, she did. It was a delicate procedure involving 5-0 PDS, Alloderm, and fibrin glue -- but in the end, we fixed her trachea. As we were about to lift her from the operating table and onto the hospital bed, her blood pressure tanked. There I was, standing dumbly in an all-too-familiar scene: CPR, epinephrine, atropine, bagging... Suddenly, the attending surgeon took a blade, made a gigantic left thoracotomy, and started internal cardiac massage. I saw the infant's walnut-sized heart jiggling listlessly in the surgeon's overpowering, clumsy fingers. Two hours later (after venting the right chest, inadvertent myocardial laceration, subsequent repair, and fresh line placement), the patient finally made it back to her ICU room. "Her pH is 6.7," I reported to the attending surgeon. He pursued his lips and nodded slowly. "Yeah. Yeah, that's not good." We stood quietly by her bedside for several minutes, watching the nurses fuss with the lines and the drips. I broke the silence. "I'd prefer it if she didn't die on my shift." He sighed. "But she probably will," he said. I hung my head. "I know. I know." |
| | Posted 5/3/2007 3:59 AM - 1 view - 5 comments
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Job market is wide open too.
