Today I heard a story at lunch. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen things happen like this before. A woman came into a trauma and was pretty much gone. The details I don't know, but there really was no saving this woman. Yet the family wanted the doctors to "do whatever is necessary to save her." That opens up the biggest and worst can of worms.
One of the residents thought she had a pneumothorax. So he went to perform a needle chest decompression and there actually was no pneumothorax. Instead, with his intervention, he then caused a pneumothorax. So they decide to put in a chest tube. The resident was pushing it in and hitting some resistance so the chief resident grabbed it and shoved it in with force. They take the x-ray to look at the placement and see that the tube had been shoved in so hard it went across the mediastinum, into the other lung, causing a pneumothorax on the other side.
Yeah.
No comments:
Post a Comment