Every Doctor’s Nightmare
Bobak Akhavan ~
Zachary Reese ~
“Does a rock float on water?” I asked the haggard woman lying in the ICU bed.
I was an intern, in the first rotation of my medical residency, and Mrs. Jones had been my ICU team’s patient for the past week. Over that time, she’d looked more and more uncomfortable, constantly gesturing for her breathing tube to be removed.
Mrs. Jones tried to form words in response to my question, but the plastic tube in her mouth prevented it. Her chest rose and fell in rhythm with the ventilator’s hiss as the machine pumped air into her lungs; her muscles were too weak to do the work themselves.
After several attempts at speaking, she gave up
Holland M. Kaplan ~
I’m sitting in the ICU team room, staring at the computer, trying to look like I’m writing a note. But my head is pounding.
As an internal-medicine resident doing my first month of residency, I’ve found the ICU of the bustling county hospital a jarring place to start my training. Although I’d anticipated the clinical challenge of caring for very ill ICU patients, I was unprepared for the emotional burden of having to deliver devastating, life-altering news to them and to their family members.
Faint yells emerge from Room 7. They have an almost rhythmic quality: “Ahhh!”…(three seconds)…”Ahhh!”…(three seconds)…”Ahhh!”
It’s Ms. Burton. I’ve just gotten back from checking on her, but I plod back again.
Joe Andrie ~
It’s another day for me as an intern on the labor-and-delivery floor of my large urban hospital–another day scrambling to help pregnant women deliver and trying to keep pace with the unpredictable timetable of the birthing process.
My hospital phone rings. I’m really starting to dread that sound.
It’s the triage nurse. We’re admitting a patient: Mrs. Harris, age thirty-four, who’s had several prior deliveries and therefore carries the label “multiparous,” or just “multip.”
Flipping through her records, I see “G5P4” noted. “G” means the number of pregnancies; “P” indicates how many children she has.
A mother of four who’s at term and having contractions…I’ve seen such women give birth within a matter of minutes. In plain
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