Tuesday, April 19, 2005

How things worked out

Well, slightly calmer this post. Have finished my night shifts, tomorrow off to the prisons. And I am stunned, and happy, and deeply tired, but I am going to write this.

So, what happened next?

Well, I rang up and she was in ICU post surgery, and the ICU registrar said she had ARDS (which is a kind of malignant pneumonia, it means the stuff that she vomited when she was in the resuscitation went into her lungs - it's never good) and very probably hypoxic brain damage.

I rang and a couple of nurses went up there after their shifts and apparently there was someone crying and so on.

And then while I am asleep my wife gets a phone call from the ED secretary (a princess amongst women) who says that the woman we resuscitated has been extubated (they took the tube out of her throat) and she is awake and talking.

Words bloody fail me. This is not the first time this has happened. We resuscitated a woman a few years back who was wheeled through the door in cardorespiratory arrest, and we worked on her for forty minutes until the Royal came and took her away, and the next day she was sitting up in bed writing querulous notes to her husband.

People can be almost divinely resilient.

And for all the bad stats, CPR does work. Learn CPR.

Here endeth the lesson. Last night was considerably calmer, too.

Now I somehow have to get my mind back to normal. I have to clean the house and ring my kids and tomorrow is my judo grading.

Will write soon.

Thanks for reading,
John

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Am hugely relieved to hear everything turned out all right! That was quite a harrowing story, I'm glad it had a happy ending.

10:36 PM  

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