* * Anonymous Doc

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

I have a new intern who tends to save the punchline for the end. In a medical context, this isn't a good thing.

"...Remember that patient we admitted, with hypertension, and she was doing better, and then she was doing worse, and then her family was here, and then she didn't really eat anything yesterday, and then the attending said we should monitor her, and so we ran an extra set of labs overnight, and then I checked this morning and she seemed stable... yeah, she's not breathing."

"...And remember the guy who came in yesterday with the chest pain, and his wife was concerned because he'd lifted something heavy the day before, and she thought he's been having memory issues, but she wasn't totally sure, and there was no documented dementia but you wanted me to call a neuro consult just to check what was going on, but then they didn't get to him yesterday so they were going to see him today... yeah, he just fell out of bed and he's bleeding from the back of his head."

4 comments:

  1. Talk about a right brained individual.

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  2. Still better than the 'red herring' style of delivery... dropping in the most critical information somewhere in the middle -- then proceeding on the mundane details in a whatever fashion.

    "Remember that patient who kept going on and on about her cat and that she needs to change allergy meds because the current ones aren't working for her; oh, she just had a cardiac arrest . . . BUT about those new allergy meds that she wanted--"

    ReplyDelete