Saturday, January 31, 2009

are you busy?

I'm standing the preop area in the morning talking to some of the residents before cases get started for the day. One of the preop nurses comes over...

"Are you busy?" Fateful last words "Are you covering the recovery room?"

No cases have come out into recovery room yet, "I'm not covering, but you need help with something?"

"Can you come over and look at one of our perioperative techs? She's having some chest pain? We're going to hook her up to the monitors... could you look at her EKG?"

They bring her over to a recovery slot, hook her up to monitors, everything looks okay, vital signs stable.... I take one of the residents over with me... we start getting some history.

Family history of vascular disease... pain started this morning while she was moving things around in the OR... yes I've had his before... not as bad as this time... it's always gone away.... just a little short of breath... just a little sweaty....

She looks fine to me, but the story is a little suspicious for having heart disease... soon my resident and I are wheeling her over to the ER... just to be sure.

Of course she qualifies for chest pain protocol.... they want to "rule her out" (2 sets of EKGs and blood tests 8 hours apart to see if there's heart damage) and probably watch her overnight maybe a stress test in the morning...

Never a dull moment.