Tuesday, April 26, 2005

A New York Times article that reads like a medblog post

A surgeon's nightmare case: Far From the Medical Trenches, It's O.K. to Laugh
Suspecting the worst, at the worst of times - 3 a.m., operating on a stab wound of the heart, where no heart surgery was done - I drove to the hospital. The weather, a storm, matched my expectations.

When I arrived, the patient's blood pressure was teetering at 70 over 40, and his pulse was ephemeral. It was too late to move him to our well-staffed and equipped cardiac surgical center.

He smelled awful, like a pericardial tamponade - a collection of blood between the fibrous sac enclosing the heart and the heart muscle. The blood leaking from the heart, having no place to go, was accumulating and compressing the heart so that it could not pump. Like a vise squeezing the heart.

Ordinarily, repairing a stab wound of the heart is a simple procedure, but at the Park Avenue, it was going to be like climbing out of a crevasse without a rope.
Quick, get this doc a blog!
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