Bad Night

How much did my last night on Super SAR suck ass? On the universal scale of suckitude, let me tell you, it sucked a pretty damn lot.

It started off in a benign enough fashion. The first hour or so was pretty quiet, so I went upstairs to visit my friend Aravind, on call in the CCU--he's a big Steelers fan and was hoping he might have time to catch a bit of the Sunday night Pittsburgh-Cleveland game. Well, Aravind was busy trying to put in a central line into an unstable patient and I somehow got roped into helping him out. 30 minutes later the line was in but the patient was coding and soon after had expired.

The night got worse after that. The lowlights included:
-the 23 yo guy with idiopathic hypertrophic subaortic stenosis (the same thing which resulted in the death of basketball legend Hank Gathers about a decade ago) who showed up unannounced in the CCU after his defibrillator fired.
-the 4 a.m. surgery patient who was transferred to the MICU due to hypotension & hypoxia possibly due to a pulmonary embolism or maybe sepsis, not sure which.
-the patient called in from the ER at 6:30 a.m. with ulcers in the genital and buttocks areas--not exactly the kind of thing you want to see at that hour.
-spilling lukewarm coffee on my scrubs just before going home.

All of this is of course tempered by The Good News: it was my last night of SSAR for 3 wks! I go onto elective (and a normal person's 9-to-5 schedule) starting tomorrow...