Fat

Wow.

One of my rare days now where I'm not doing cardiac or thoracic cases.

The patient had a Body Mass Index (BMI= weight in kg/ [height in meters]squared) of 78! Overweight is above 25, obese above 30. It's a little conservative in my opinion, but this is ridiculous. He was 5 foot 6 or so, and above 220kg. (~500 lbs) fortunately he was here for gastric bypass surgery.

When they're this big, you worry if you're able to get IV access, establish the airway, and whether the surgeons will have difficulty with the procedure.

Anyway, after we put the patient to asleep and intubated him the attending surgeon asked:

"How did you know that would be easy?"

My reply, "I didn't."

I moved along into how we examine the patient and the markers we look for that predict difficulty (or lack thereof)

Luckily no problems.

I did have salad for lunch... I need to work on my own BMI.