This has been a mad week end indeed!
With all the students and the consultants away for the examination week ,I was supposed to be the lone doctor managing the medical out-patient which has an average of eighty to ninety patients,I actually ended up seeing my usual thirty patients (don't ask me how ? we have not solved the mystery as yet),second call for the emergencies in medicine ,as well as consultant incharge of the wards and the acute care unit with another resident doing the hands on.
Yesterday evening,a patient with a broncho-pleural fistula went into an acute episode of traumatic pneumothorax following a tube block-he was a hefty man to boot who already had a chronic kidney disease,it was a frightening three hours with us almost losing him but somehow we got the better of the pneumothorax with my heart in my throat even as we flailed around with the patient.Thanks to the few colleagues around who were such a rock I thought I would collapse on the spot.Just as the calm was setting in and I was trying to mentally go through the event ,I suddenly remembered that I had kept my food on the hot-plate and had been heating the water to boot and that was three hours ago...My flat is a little more than a hundred metres away.I was not only sprinting ,I was frantically praying that my flat had not caught fire by then.The hot-plate was miraculously switched off,I did have the presence of mind after all,but the room where the water was getting heated was full of steam...it could have been a bath!I put the switch off ..thanked the lord for small and big mercies.
The next day saw my colleague back on duty,gracefully offering to take on the tougher bit,seeing my ordeal.......it was lunch time before the hunger pang reminded me that I had forgotten to eat my dinner and my breakfast...the food was happily cooling it's heel on the hot-plate!
With all the students and the consultants away for the examination week ,I was supposed to be the lone doctor managing the medical out-patient which has an average of eighty to ninety patients,I actually ended up seeing my usual thirty patients (don't ask me how ? we have not solved the mystery as yet),second call for the emergencies in medicine ,as well as consultant incharge of the wards and the acute care unit with another resident doing the hands on.
Yesterday evening,a patient with a broncho-pleural fistula went into an acute episode of traumatic pneumothorax following a tube block-he was a hefty man to boot who already had a chronic kidney disease,it was a frightening three hours with us almost losing him but somehow we got the better of the pneumothorax with my heart in my throat even as we flailed around with the patient.Thanks to the few colleagues around who were such a rock I thought I would collapse on the spot.Just as the calm was setting in and I was trying to mentally go through the event ,I suddenly remembered that I had kept my food on the hot-plate and had been heating the water to boot and that was three hours ago...My flat is a little more than a hundred metres away.I was not only sprinting ,I was frantically praying that my flat had not caught fire by then.The hot-plate was miraculously switched off,I did have the presence of mind after all,but the room where the water was getting heated was full of steam...it could have been a bath!I put the switch off ..thanked the lord for small and big mercies.
The next day saw my colleague back on duty,gracefully offering to take on the tougher bit,seeing my ordeal.......it was lunch time before the hunger pang reminded me that I had forgotten to eat my dinner and my breakfast...the food was happily cooling it's heel on the hot-plate!
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