emergency medicine!

i got some cool psych stories but they are gonna have to take a back seat because i shadowed at the LA county/USC emergency department trauma center yesterday [3pm to midnight] and holy shit was it cool. not only did i meet the most amazing people and get some great networks, i got to see a ton of cool medicine. highlight of the day: around 5pm paramedics brought in a lady who was found unresponsive at home and was found by EMTs to be in arrest, she was practically pronounced there but they shocked her and got a rhythm back. she came to us and they worked on her for about 2 hours. she went into every rhythm possible and ended up on 5 pressers! we even shocked her about 3 times [looks NOTHING like on the TV show] and each time she went back into normal sinus. it was truly amazing. she rolled in and immediately had 3 doctors, a ton of nurses and 2 pharmacists helping. she was getting a subclavian line on the left while getting a heimlich valve on her right chest for pneumothorax. they couldnt find an IV line so they ended up doing an IO her her R tibia [basically drilling a small hole into her bone to get into her bone marrow for venous blood access]. they also ended up doing a femoral line on her which i have never seen, the resident did it blind with no ultrasound. awesome.
so that all happened, the patient ended being up tons of meds to keep her heart going and a vent to breathe for her. by the time family was called and updated, they told us she was in stage 4 pancreatic cancer and all life sustaining efforts were removed per their request. i wasnt there at the time but apparently she died in minutes.

at that time, i was meeting the most awesome doctor who said she would help me along my EM path and become my mentor [did i mention i think i am going into EM...just still not 100% yet].  shes a DO from Western and did her residency in EM at USC. she is badass and i am looking forward to her helping me along the way.

Yesterday was awesome and it opened me up into a new network of doctors. the biggest thing i have learned from this and the EM conference is that everything is about networking...its about who you know and who you contact. so im gonna start putting myself out there more and more. cant hurt i guess?