- Joined
- Aug 9, 2009
- Messages
- 356
- Reaction score
- 29
The only thing I want to hear from a consult anymore is: Name, Medical Record Number, patient's bed, reason for consult. Faster to figure it out from there than to talk/argue.
Amen to that. Even though I'm phasing out of surgery, I'm in a moonlighting type job that still requires me to see consults sometimes, mostly vascular. Most common goes something like this: one foot slightly cooler than the other, the medical person can't feel pulses, claims s/he can't doppler pulses (or simply says, "I don't do that, don't know how". I can usually get a signal and write a note that ends "no need for vascular surgery intervention"
My most memorable consult in residency: As PGY 2, I was called to MICU. Pt was declining hemodynamically, with something like 50 bands on WBC. She had a pretty big ventral hernia. The MICU had done a CT scan 3 days prior, and the report said "hernia contains colon, not incarcerated". WTF? I thought, "since when is incarceration a radiologic diagnosis??" I examined the pt and the hernia was non reducable. The medical team had rounded on the pt for the past two days, writing, "non reducable hernia, not incarcerated per radiology report" Somebody wasn't paying attention during their surgery rotation!
Upon opening, we were able to treat the medical student on our rotation to the smell of dead bowel, as a very black transverse colon was the first thing visible in the hernia. Pt died a couple days later.