30 Something Baby Doc

We had a very busy night call a few day ago. The physician team was short a resident on labor and delivery and there were multiple patients laboring and close to delivering. The residents were scrubbed into a C-section and I was the only available physician. One of the nurses called me to her room urgently because she was concerned about her patient who had a C-section 1 day earlier. The patient stood up to feed her baby, then collapsed to the floor. When I entered the room the patient was very pale and sweating. The nurses was also concerned because she couldn't alleviate the patients abdominal pain following the surgery which she thought was very unusual. We were all thinking the same thing.

Could this patient be bleeding internally????

I examined the patient completely and reviewed her vital signs. All the objective signs told me that this patient wasn't hemorrhaging internally. But the nurse was persistent that something was wrong with her patient. I reassured the patient and her husband that everything looked OK at the moment and the fainting episode was likely due to the large amount of pain medications she had received. I got called away to another emergency , an hour later , the nurse contacted me to give me the lab results on her patient who passed out. Her blood counts were stable and not dropping. The latter reassured me that everything was OK, but the nurse was persistent that something was wrong with her patient and her increased pain was concerning.

I was going to blow the nurse off (feeling she was being overly paranoid) but her persistence compelled me to get an ultrasound to scan the patients belly. When I did, I saw that the patient had a large amount of fluid in here abdomen that was most likely BLOOD. The patient's pain had also become unbearable.

We rushed the patient back to the operating room and opened her incision and discovered she had one and a half liters of blood in here abdomen. We immediately controlled the bleeding and cleaned the blood and clot out of her abdomen. The patient did very well following the surgery (and a few blood transfusions).

The husband came to thank me after the surgery and express his angers toward the nurse because he felt she was ignoring his wife's complaints. I informed him that their nurse was instrumental in discovering his wife's internal hemorrhage and had likely saved her life.

I went to personally thank the nurse for her persistence.

I need to really LISTEN to others more.

I noticed a strand of lint in my hair this morning and attempted to pull it out. Unfortunately , it wasn't lint, but was another gray hair.

I'm 36 and to this date , I can count all my gray hairs on one hand. (2 in my afro and 1 in my goatee)

The latter to me represents obvious signs that I am aging. I'm less that 4 years away from the age of 40 and my mortality is becoming more of a reality.

I think of all the things in my life that I want to still accomplish (things that make a positive difference) but I feel that my time is finite. I no longer have the sense of immortality that I had in my 20's and early 30's but now I feel time is catching up with me.

So much to do, so little time.

I was planning to go to Vegas this week t0 attend a medical conference. I registered for the conference just prior to the deadline several weeks ago. The web site wouldn't accept my CC payment, therefore I frantically gave multiple attemps to log my CC number in the system. Finally, after several error messages, I gave up. Thinking it wasn't meant to be.

I was out to dinner with my family (when they were in town), I tried to use my credit card to pay for dinner and it was rejected. I use another card, thinking it was a computer glitch. When I got home that night, I decided to check my credit card status online and to my shock, I found nearly 20 charges for $1000 (the cost of the conference). I was $5000 over my limit and the next minimum payment was $6000. All the charges had went thru. I call my CC company that night to claim the charges a fraudulant. (I'm suprised they approved all those charges in the first place). I called the medical conference the next day, and I was relieved to find out that others had experienced similar problems and the company was working hard to credit everyones card.

I contemplated whether or not I should still go and realized I have too much work to complete in town with my new house and also several teaching responsibilites at my job. I decided to use this as vacation time, stay in town and be productive.

Maybe this winter of spring, I'll finally experience VEGAS

As a physician, I always feel that I must have all the answers and I must know everything about my specialty.

Today I encountered a situation where I had to ask for help from one of my colleagues. I wanted to be autonomous and proceed on my own, but I didn't want to risk patient safety.

It was a strange, uneasy feeling