Sunday, August 27, 2006

On call

This is a short post because it has been a long day in the cardiac intensive care unit at Northwestern. I am on call tonight -- this isn't the on call of TV where the doctor is in the hospital, running around, saving lives. Been there, done that (except for the saving lives bit -- believe it or not, I feel that happens rarely).

Nope. Now I take call from home, the middleman between the resident and intern who stay, as we say, "in house" all night, and the attending, who stays at home except in the direst of circumstances. I am the one who goes in if I am needed.

I used to be scared of this brand of call, especially because I have to be the one who decides if a person who is having a heart attack has to get an angioplasty in the middle of the night or not. But now I'm not (as much) because I've figured out that 90% of the fear was uncertainty, and 90% of the uncertainty can be removed by "eyeballing" the patient. There is no room for inertia in medicine, I've learned. The old clinical aphorism "if you think you should do something, you probably should" definitely holds true. In medicine as well as life.

They told me that the biggest thing to learn in med school is to learn how to eyeball a patient -- that is at one glance be able to distinguish between those who are very sick and demand immediate attention and those who are less urgently ill. I definitely think this is sound advice. In quest of a person's eyeball sense, or "gestalt", one will often hear docs say, "is this person sick or not sick?"

So if you hear that, please don't think that the doc is silly for asking if a patient in the hospital is sick.

This simple act of eyeballing can change everything. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a good "eyeball" is worth a million.

So this is for all the docs who are on call (real call, in house) tonight-- keep your eyes peeled, do what you think you have to do, and may you be rewarded with coffee, bagels, and a fast-rounding attending in the morning!

6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Kannan,
Nice to see another Tamil Med blogger. I'm sure I'll be back to read more here :)

2:42 PM  
Blogger Kannan said...

thanks very much for the positive feedback!

7:54 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Aha! I wanted to ask what nationality you were ... but Dr. Scan Man gave you away! ;o)

I'm also delighted to see a growing number of you blogging! It's opening up a whole new world for those of us who are getting to know all of you.

Dr. Scan Man has been kind enough to introduce me to some Tamil music, traditions, festivals ... and he's managed to turn me into an "Indophile." It wasn't hard for him to do!

11:51 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The "eyeballing" of a patient has nursing applications, too.

Ever see a patient who "looks" okay, but your gut tells you something isn't right? I spent my first 8 years in Coronary Care, back when surviving 5 years after a bypass was good. You can almost "feel it".

Happens to me all the time in ER. I am lucky enough to work with doctors who will often act on my uneasiness when it comes to discharging a patient.

10:58 AM  
Blogger Lisa said...

Oh good Lord, my medical woes start when people think they can "eyeball" my mid-thirties self with a flushed face; steroids: always mistaken for a healthy glow.

11:57 PM  
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1:48 AM  

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