Word: chests
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...patient's room eager not to show how we panted. A 10-sec. synopsis of the patient's situation would come from a nurse or medical resident while we took our places. I was amazed how natural this behavior seemed, unrehearsed, undirected but seamlessly coordinated: Somebody pumping the chest; somebody bagging (holding a mask over the patient's face and squeezing the bag that forced air into the lungs); somebody reading the continuous EKG strip and calling out meds; the nurses getting, giving and recording the drugs; the medical students and younger residents drawing bloods from veins and arteries, labeling...
...intern you want experience and responsibility - you are trying to become a surgeon, so you want to do what's hard. At the code you hope to intubate, or to put in the huge IVs we use in the big veins of the neck or chest. If the chief wasn't there yet we were the ones who had to start giving directions to the nurses and medical people who filled the room. A smart intern in this situation always watched the face of the oldest nurse and changed course when it told...
...Here pumping the chest, inflating the lungs, filling the blood vessels and starting the heart were the immediate and technically demanding needs. It was only when the medicine was unknown to us or very complex - renal failure cases, rare diseases or cancer patients on weird experimental chemo - that we looked to the medical residents for help...
...first thing to do was sort out the bodies. The other bed in the room was empty, so we picked up the nurse and put her on her back on a back-board (a flat piece of plywood that makes chest compressions more effective than they are on a soft bed). She had no palpable pulse and the nurses couldn't get a blood pressure, but she was still weakly responsive to noxious stimuli. This is the medical term for stuff that bothers...
...Being plopped onto a piece of plywood, having your clothes ripped off, a two hundred pound man driving the heels of his hands into the center of your chest while others poke needles into your limbs and groin, another squeezes a rubber mask over your face and another prepares to send four hundred watt-seconds of electricity across your body is a noxious stimulus, however you slice...