Code Blue

I had a couple of crazy doctor experiences last week--things had been getting kind of boring and I needed an adrenaline rush.

The first one happened early friday morning. I had been on call and busy until about 3am, so I was sleeping soundly in the call room when a "code blue" woke me up at 0545. (that's the overhead code for a patient who's heart has stopped, has stopped breathing, etc.) It was in the hospital lobby, and place infamous among us residents for non-emergency code blues (codes blue?) consisting mostly of old people fainting or slipping on the floor. Usually the code team runs through the hospital, adrenaline pumping, only to find grandma sitting up with a bewildered look on her face surrounded by curious onlookers. So I was a bit disgruntled to be woken up for that. However I dutifully ran, er, jogged to the lobby and found a patient on the floor with a nurse doing chest compressions. Turns out this was a real emergency. Since it was so early in the morning I was the only doc around. With the nurses, respiratory therapists and others we did chest compressions (breaking most of his ribs), gave medications, defribrillated 7 times, put in a breating tube and eventually got this guy's heart started again after 20 minutes of work right there in the lobby. The poor people arriving that morning for there surgeries, etc., were greeted with the traumatic site of some guy surrounded by medical people doing compressions, shocking, etc. Somebody mentioned afterward that we might want to see if anyone needed counseling from the hospital after seeing that. The good news is that he recovered quite well, and I stopped by his room a couple of days later and he was sitting up eating lunch. So now I have a bit more respect for the hospital lobby code blue calls.

Then then next morning I helped out in the medical tent at the Ogden Marathon finish line. We had the usual suspects--mostly dehydrated, vomiting, light-headed runners. I was tending to one of these when one of the other residents called me over to help him carry a guy to the back of the tent. This guy was unconcious and the resident told me his temperature with the ear thermometer was 41 degress C (105.8F). This is one of our worst fears in the medical tent--full-on heatstroke. A core temperature of 108F has a mortality rate of 80% (muscles start to breakdown and the byproducts clog the kidneys, and brain tissue doesn't do so well). So we had to check a core temperature, you can guess the only way to do that, but the guy wasn't concious enough to care anyway. It was 107.6F. There's no time to send someone to the ER with a temperature that high, they'll die too fast. We put him in one of the two kiddie pools full of water that we have on hand for just this problem, then dumped in a few hundred pounds of ice, packing it on his groin and femoral arteries, armpits and neck, while supporting his head on the edge of the pool. I've never had to treat a patient while he was in a pool of water. I kept passing towels to the nurses starting IVs on both arms so they could dry them off in order to tape the IV in place. I couldn't get gloves on because my hands were wet, and my feet got soaked. I checked a blood pressure and pulse with his arm underwater. We ran our IV fluid through the icewater he was in. After 10 minutes of this his temperature was down to 105, and he was a little bit more awake. Another 10 minutes and he was screaming "This is soooo cooold!" but still was pretty confused, and his temp was 103. The goal is to get patients to 102 before sending them to the ER, and he was there after another 5 minutes in the ice bath, and we sent him off to on an ambulance. He survived, we recommended no more marathons.

My kitchen tile

Just showing off my kitchen tile--did this in February, while on "vacation." One night I worked on it until midnight. It was about 15 degrees outside and I was using the tile saw, which uses spraying water to lubricate the blade, outside on the back porch. The water tubes kept freezing up and the tile kept freezing to the saw table, so I used hot water from the bathtub in a bucket as my water source and periodically poured it over the saw to unthaw everything. What kind of vacation was that? As misereable as it was, I couldn't help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it.

HB Photos

First Post

Well I've thought about starting a blog for . . . a few minutes, so I thought I'd better do it while I had the desire. Actually I've enjoyed seeing what everyone's up to so thought I'd better add one of my own. Can't guarantee consistency here though--we'll see how long my blogging enthusiasm persists.

I'm currently trying to deal with going back to work after spending 4 days in Huntington Beach with cousins Jon and Allison and some other folks. We stayed in a sweet beach house 4 blocks from the beach, and life revolved around the beach the whole time. We did participate in a "mid" singles conference for 1.5 of those days, where I was searching for a nice cougar, but had no luck. Hmmm, that was a bit ascerbic, I suppose--more accurate to say that if I'd have met someone from Utah that was attractive and not too much older than me, that would have been nice, but I didn't. But I did spend a cumulative 7 or 8 hours in the waves boogie boarding, and even tried surfing a bit. And I got appropriately rocked by a few waves which is half the fun. Some pictures precede.