death

I know it's not a weekday, but my posting has become sporadic as of late so I'll update whenever the inspiration comes around. I was hanging around Angiography on Friday thinking about making tea. We usually make tea around 2 PM, just to have something to keep us going throughout the rest of the workday. You'd think one of our English radiologists would have started the trend, but it was just some overeager nurse who had some time on her hands who started what has become tradition on 2A3.

Around this time, radiologists in Room 2 were working on a lady whom I will refer to as P. She had stenosis of one of her left leg arteries, so they were putting in a Maverick stent. The procedure was a bit of a complicated one because the narrowing was in a bent point of the artery, so they took good time working on it. Everything went swimmingly, and the nurses came in to do their post-workup assessments.

You see, everyone was focusing so much on her left leg that nobody had checked out her right leg during this time. One nurse peeled back a blanket from her right leg and found this MASSIVE hematoma, just this gigantic, bruising mass that left her thigh area so distended that it was about the size of two fists balled up put side by side. The doctors estimated that there was about 2-3 units of blood that had been leaking from an artery in her right leg, but nobody had noticed it because the focus had been on her left leg's stenosed artery.

P.'s blood pressure kept dropping as she was loosing blood, and got to such a dangerous state that we called the MET (Medical Emergency Team) - the team you call when your patient is crashing or about to crash. Immediately, everyone comes running into our unit, and Room 2 is flooded with doctors, nurses, UNEs, techs - Brock Lesnar could probably walk in dressed in a monkey suit and not look out of place in this mish-mash crowd of individuals. They all work on stabilizing P. when Lisa asks me and Tyler whether either of us knows where the blood bank is. I've sent some samples up to that area for blood typing before so I'm sent running upstairs with a req for two units of O neg.

I've got to say that since coming into a health care scenario, I have never experienced anything so acute. Jay predicted P. wouldn't last through the night, so running up two flights of stairs to beg for two bags of blood post haste felt kind of surreal. Running back the way I came holding two pouches of lifeblood felt like I was part of the team effort, even though I was simply the messenger. I arrived with the blood and they hooked it up and squished them in and I went on my way - 3:30 and end of the day.

I guess what I drew from this experience was that I'm glad I'm going in to a health care profession - I can see myself nowhere else. Rehabilitation isn't saving lives, but I just know that I am happy being in a place where I can increase someone's livelihood and well being.