Internal Medicine
signout | July 31, 2006I got a spot of blood on my dress today. It happened as I was on my way out of the hospital and heard the code bells ring. I ran, cursing, past two women clutching each other in a hallway, into a room where a man was lying unconscious in a chair, blood trickling from his mouth. He was a pre-transplant patient-a man about to get a new liver.
Ideally, a code is a carefully choreographed disaster. No one expects the outcome to be good, but everyone expects the process to be organized.
This code was a disastrous disaster. I didn't participate this time-just tried to stay out of the way. The…
signout | July 10, 2006You'll hear residents everywhere refer to "codes" as both the most terrifying and the most exhilarating experiences they have during training. "Code" is short for "code blue," or "code red," or whatever term each hospital applies to situations wherein help is needed in resuscitating a patient. It's used as a noun ("I wet my pants during the code today") and a verb, both transitive ("Rounds were so boring today, I nearly had to code my attending") and intransitive ("Your patient probably coded because of the Tylenol you wrote for"). Codes are often chaotic, and, I won't hesitate to tell you,…
signout | July 8, 2006When I was a little kid, we had a yearly raffle at my elementary school that I won every year with such weird regularity that I started to think of myself as lucky. It's been a long, downhill slide ever since, but when I started residency a couple of weeks ago, it seemed I might have gotten my game back: against all odds, I was a white cloud.
In hospital slang, white clouds are people who, through good luck alone, have fewer difficult patients on their services and fewer unpleasant call nights. As one of them, my call nights had been easy. I'd been getting more sleep than any person…