Perspective

While driving through the downtown of our small but not insignificant Midwestern city (there are corn fields five miles from the city center but we do have the state capital and a handful of miniature skyscrapers) I noticed a fat brown squirrel scampering down a tree and bounding across the street in the halting but graceful manner that can only be executed by a squirrel.   From between two buildings a large hawk dove at the squirrel and, opening its wings and rotating its talons forward at the last second, grabbed the squirrel by the head nearly decapitating it from the violence of the attack.   It flew back into the skyline with the limp body of the squirrel swinging from its claws.

My friends, the squirrel is us, you me and everybody bouncing along through life in our own halting, occasionally graceful manner.

The hawk is death.

Edumucation

Our good blog-friend Cosmic Connie over at Whirled Musings brings up an interesting point about the proliferation of easily obtainable on-line and mail-order degrees.  I think she is just scratching the surface of the problem.  While it is easy to identify fly-by-night diploma mills, most of what is considered legitimate higher education in this country is essentially the same thing; a lot more expensive with better ambiance and legions of fawning admirers but diploma mills just the same.

In fact, if there is a bigger scam than higher education or one supported by such a collection of self-interested grifters (who nevertheless bask in public adulation) I have yet to hear about it.  In terms of shadiness, only the CHIP program, an offshoot of Medicaid designed to funnel Other People’s Money into lucrative Pediatric Emergency Departments and Children’s Hospitals purpose-built to loot this rich bonanza even comes close.  Indeed, just as most of the money spent on the goat-rodeo of American Medicine is mostly wasted, most of the money spent on higher education is also mostly just thrown away producing little benefit to society except the employment of fearsome armies of educational bureaucrats who would otherwise be fit for nothing but agricultural labor.

That and serving as federally subsidized day care for 18-to-24-year-olds who would otherwise be inflating the unemployment statistics, safely warehousing them for another four years as sizable majorities of them pursue Mickey Mouse degrees.

Even prestigious universities are mostly now nothing but diploma mills and federal student aid farms where anybody who qualifies for student loans will be fed into the pipeline to emerge at the other end with as much money squeezed out of them as possible. If you think it is otherwise you are sadly deluded. A modern university is a self-perpetuating bureaucratic octopus, growing bloated as only an organization with unlimited access to public money can, and requiring only one thing: a steady supply of warm students shoveled into the front end to be kept in the mill as long as possible.

And the price of a degree keeps going up, outpacing inflation, not because the quality of the educational product has improved but because there is so much federal loan money available to pay for it.  The suckers keep lining up to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars for easy, meaningless degrees that give them something to put on their resume when they apply for a job at Starbucks.  There used to be educational standards but now there is a university for everyone and a Mickey Mouse degree to be had at any level of educational ability and for any level of scholarly ambition.  May as well get a mail-order degree and save yourself the tuition.

The relevance to Goat Rodeodery?  Only that maybe the string of initials after everybody and his brother’s name may not mean as much as was once believed.  Certainly the number of initials, abbreviations, and credentials listed on a hospital identification badge is usually inversely proportional to real education.

You Missed It…

Every week or so I get a comment or an email from someone who was once passionate about the idea of Emergency Medicine but after reading my blog decided to eschew it in favor of some other specialty.

Unfortunately, I may have given the wrong impression about Emergency Medicine. It is true that much of American medicine is either a cruel grind or sublimely ridiculous.  Keeping this in mind however, Emergency Medicine is a blast.  It has everything: Sick patients who really need your help and are mighty appreciative of it. Absolute medical train wrecks who, tenaciously refusing to shuffle off their mortal coil, are dumped onto you with the expectation that you can and will squeeze just a little more functionally pointless life out of them.  Shootings.  Stabbings.  Every manner of human virtue and vice.  Minor complaints.  Serious complaints. Ridiculous complaints. Really, really ridiculous complaints.  You name it, we’ve got it and to reject the never-ending passion play and freak show of Emergency Medicine is to avow a certain disinterest in mankind, a desire to have nothing but sanitized interactions with your patients who have been scrubbed clean (often literally) and filtered through the Emergency Department.  People are generally on their best behavior in a clinic or the wards (or at least their better behavior) but in the Emergency Department we see them in the raw; man primordial, folly and nobility magnified.

But you have to love chaos.  I’ll give you that.  Not that the department is chaotic all of time but every now and then when the waiting room is packed and the ambulances keep rolling in with more critical patients, when the Friday night drunks are particularly demanding and the drug-seekers exceptionally whiny, when you are short-staffed and the charge nurse is making fists at you to move your many patients either in or out; when the impatient families are growing angrier by the minute and everybody is feeling harassed and overworked…when everything seems to be devolving into mayhem, confusion, and carnage you had best be able to prioritize and multitask like a friggin’ supercomputer or you probably actually won’t like Emergency Medicine.

The hurricane rages and blows.  Huge waves slam onto the deck as the rigging comes down around your head and the ship wallows in a following sea.  You are either the kind of lunatic who laughs at the gale and spits in the wind or this kind of thing intimidates you and you can only cling to the mast in terror.  I exaggerate of course but we have had off-service rotators in tears at various points of their brief exposure to Emergency Medicine.

Another Pet Peeve

“You goddman doctors killed my mother (who is sixty-two years old, on hemodialysis three times a week for kidney failure, has bad congestive heart failure, is blind and has double below-the-knee amputations from the ravages of diabetes, has had so many strokes in the last two years that the neurologists just stand in the door and sigh, is recovering from her fifth heart attack, has been in the intensive care unit six times in the last two years, and had a very  challenging case of pneumonia which was probably the result of aspirating the chicken soup her daugter fed her even though her strokes have made it difficult for her to swallow and all of her nutrition is poured into a tube going directly into her stomach).”

Old School

I admire the physicians of yesterday who practiced at a time before medicine became so technical but I don’t necessarily accept the premise that they were better doctors.  Certainly their physical exam skills were better honed than ours are today as this was often all they had to establish a diagnosis.  They also had a much better grasp of eponyms, being able to rattle off this triad or that pentad  and their significance to the patient; often pointing out some obvious but rare eponymous physical exam finding to nail the diagnosis.  On the other hand I have a sneaking suspicion that their patients weren’t on such a hair-trigger to see a doctor and many conditions probably festered a bit until the constellation of presenting symptoms more closely mirrored what you would expect (and still see) in the textbooks.  In other words, it is one thing to confidently identify a patient deep in the throes of acute hemorrhagic pancreatitis by observing Grey Turner’s Sign (bruising on the flanks) but quite another to diagnose the same in a patient who may be early in the disease and has come to the Emergency Department or his doctor’s office with nothing but mild abdominal pain and a vague history.

Which is how it is nowadays.  In the Golden Age of Medicine, an era that is fading even from the memories of our oldest attendings and in a time before life had become medicalized to the degree it has today, since it was accepted that doctors couldn’t do much patients tended to stay home until something was obviously wrong.  A patient came in with nausea, vomiting, fever, and severe pain in the right lower abdomen and Bam! Acute appendicitis or nothin’.  Today the pain is mild, the location is somewhat more generalized, and while we may not be as ready with the eponym, our differential diagnosis has to be a tad more comprehensive and the work up, because of the legal consequences of missing a diagnosis not to mention the availability of sophisticated tests and imaging as well as appropriate interventions, needs to be more exhaustive.  It is the exhaustive nature of American medicine, the now firmly established belief that everything is an emergency, that contributes to the high cost of everything we do and I’m not sure if the money we spend has really bought us that much, at least not in relation to the vast sums of money that we continue to dump into the sucking pit of medical care.

I mention this not because I necessarily believe that preemptive vigilance is a bad thing, just that it is an extremely expensive way to practice medicine and it may be that a little more of a guarded approach, a commitment to watch and wait might save a lot of money with no effect on morbidity and mortality.  Surely, as an example, every woman early in her pregnancy with some spotting and mild pelvic pain does not need a full workup for an ectopic pregnancy although if you come through our department and have any of these symptoms, even if your chief complaint was a sore throat, you will have a full battery of expensive tests to rule it out.

Do I take ectopic pregnancies seriously?  Of course I do.  But I’d say that I probably initiate twenty negative workups for every ectopic I find and the positive ones are often clinically obvious with the studies ordered to confirm the diagnosis.   The question is whether waiting a day or two would effect the outcome and whether the occasional benefit of early detection is worth the money we spend ruling out the majority that turn out to be nothing but a little bit of pain from a stretching uterus and a bit of normal physiological bleeding.  Like I said, you can present to any emergency Department or doctor’s office with symptoms so vague that a doctor sixty years ago wouldn’t know what to do with you but today receive a full work-up, no different than if you had waited a few days and your symptoms were more classical.

Getting A Job

Just a few observations about looking for my first post-residency job and with a hat-tip to the folks over at M.D.O.D.:   First of all, it was a pleasant experience after applying to medical school and residency to interview for a job from a position of strength.  You essentially have to beg to get into medical school because you hold no cards whatsoever and no matter how stellar a student you were or how winning your personality, there are many more qualified applicants than there are spots and it may as well be somebody else who gets picked.  Likewise with landing a decent residency position which is, like medical school admission, something of a poodle show for graduating medical students as we trot ourselves from program to program trying to convince them that we are good dogs.  Not a lot of negotiating going on, your understand, both medical school and residency being exclusively “take it or leave it” propositions….at least I never heard of fourth year medical student with so much clout that he could negotiate a residency contract (which is not really a contract at all but a documentation of indentured servitude) to his liking.

As a board-eligible physician however it is more of a seller’s market.  In my specialty there are many more jobs than there are Emergency Physicians to fill them so once you get out of the subservience mode (and certainly by the end of your residency you should be pissed off enough to not want to be every body’s little bitch all the time) you can get, within reason, any kind of job with any kind of pay that you want…all you have to do is recognize that your prospective employers need you more than you need them and act accordingly.  I am not, mind you, advocating arrogance or unreasonable salary demands, just that it is no longer necessary to beg.  In the end, you can walk away from any offer with complete impunity and no hard feelings as long as you negotiated in good faith.

Negotiating is the key.  In most cases the first number they slide across the desk or put into a draft contract is a tentative offer and most employers will not be offended by a little dickering.  Likewise with signing bonuses and even simple things like moving allowances.  Sometimes your prospective employers will offer these things up front but if not, there is no harm in asking for them or any other legal and reasonable concession.  The worst they can say is “no” and the worst you can do is respectfully decline their final offer.  Again, no hard feeling, nobody is worse for the wear.

Your room to negotiate also depends on where and for whom you want to work.  Many markets for Emergency Medicine are saturated and if, for example, you just have to live San Diego you may have to settle for a lower salary than your colleagues looking for jobs in Klamath Falls. The rules of supply and demand do not, after all, always work in your favor.  The same would apply if you wanted a junior faculty position at a Big Academic Medical Center in which case you would have to sell yourself shamelessly and probably settle for a good deal less than you could make somewhere else.

There are also many kinds of practice.  You can sign on with an established group with the intent of becoming a partner, you can work directly for a hospital system as their employee, you can work as a free-lance killer-for-hire locum tenums, or you can work for a hospital as an independent contractor to name just a few options.

Obama Watch: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

“Man-caused disaster” instead of “Terrorism” is the latest euphemism to come out of President Obama’s administration, in this case from his Secretary of Homeland Security, and shows, as if you needed any other evidence but the last eight weeks, with what a pack of morons we are dealing.   Maybe they’ll reconsider the term when Obama is surveying the glowing ruins of an American city destroyed by Alleged Foreign Perpetrators or whatever the euphemism will be for the terrorist group that manages to smuggle a nuclear device into Chicago.

I mention this because I live in an area where the Cult of Obama is very strong and yet, the other night I observed my neighbor furtively scraping the Obama bumper sticker off of his Subaru.  I think people are catching on, in other words, although there will always be the die-hard cadre of fanatical followers who dress their children in paramilitary garb and have them chant paeans of love to the Dear Leader.  My neighbor is not that fanatical however and is a decent enough guy even though his political and economic knowledge is sketchy and based largely on earnest but meaningless slogans.  He probably only voted for Obama because he didn’t know what else to do.  Surely he couldn’t have voted for that old, mean Republican who had a clue but didn’t whisper such sweet nothings into his ear.  Now, in the post-coital period when he lies vulnerable and afraid while Obama is in his kitchen drinking his beer and checking his black book my neighbor feels used and a little dirty.  He’s given it up for a guy who is just not that into him and will never return the love that was so desperately given.

Which is also the trouble with the press.  Although Obama is barely two months into His presidency and involved in scandals that make anything since the Nixon administration look like patty cakes, the paleomedia, our own professional cheer leading class, are still starry-eyed and hoping that their lover will come back for one more roll in the hay that will lead to consummation and justification (Peggy Noonan comes to mind).    I mean seriously, the Obama administration and their enablers in congress took bribes from AIG to pay their bonuses from the recent pork-laden stimulus bill, directly adding provisions to the reconciled bill, and the outcry from the press?  Tepid at best.  Politics as usual.  Ho hum.  President Obama gets a pass because, shucks, the bill was a thousand pages long and how could the Smartest and Sexiest Man in the World be expected to know what His own government is doing?  I shudder to think what it would take to get meaningful reaction out of them who were once the savage watchdogs of our democracy but have now abrogated that role to talk radio.

The press now lays prostate and sticky with sweat, wondering if it was worth it and hoping that The One will come to his senses and love them as they love Him.

(Another real question from a real reader, really sent to my real email address. -PB)

Ian writes: “You’ve described what Emergency Medicine is like but what would you say are the ideal qualities of Emergency Medicine doctors? (I seem to handle stress and emotions very well and can easily remain calm in pressing moments)”

Let me back into this question but not without first stressing that I am a resident, not a board certified Emergency Medicine physician, so you have to look at what I say from that perpective. Gruntdoc or Scalpel, both of whom have excellent blogs, can probably give you a better perspective of what it’s like to be habituated to the trenches of Emergency Medicine. I’ll give you my opinion, for what it’s worth, but I am perfectly willing to defer to superior wisdom and experience on this topic.

With this in mind, let’s consider five random patients of one of my latest shifts. They were, in no particular order, the following:

1. A chronic pain patient on 180 mg of MS-contin per day (enough to render comatose a small Cuban village), admitted to the hospital across town for a surgical consultation, put on a luxurious inpatient analgesic regimen by his admitting physician (3 mg of dilaudid IV every four hours as needed), and pretty much living the drug-seeker’s dream who nevertheless had such a desire for a smoke and a beer that he checked out against medical advice and then, when they wouldn’t take him back, decided to try our establishment. While it is true that we sometimes have trouble coordinating information, I happen to work at that other hospital too so it’s not like I couldn’t call my colleagues over there and ask what in the hell was going on.  His several hour stay in our department under my care was characterized by whining, constant demands for narcotics, and several reassessments on my part where I had to wake him from a deep sleep to ellicit symptoms of 20/10 pain all over.

“Does your back hurt?”

“Yes.”

Do your legs hurt?”

“Yes”

Does your face hurt?”

“Yes.”

‘How about your left eyebrow, does that hurt?”

“Yes.”

I refused to give him anything stronger than Toradol before I could talk to his doctor. He slept, whined, and finally called his sister who, when she showed up, constantly asked the nurses to talk to me, accused them of being lazy and became irate when I said, in no uncertain terms, that her opinion of the nurses was absolutely wrong and that she had no idea how hard they work.  They both eventually left in a fit of anger, muttering dark threats that I would be hearing from their lawyer…and they later showed up at the Emergency Room across town for the same complaint.

2. An 89-year-old severely demented woman in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease and with a past medical history that, if you added a few multiple choice questions to it, could have done decent service as a pathology exam. She was dumped from a nursing home with a chief complaint of (imperceptible) “Altered Mental Status.”  I suspected an accidental overdose of her nightly sedative (not that I had any idea of her baseline mental status, you understand) because on the transfer Medication Administration Record (MAR) from the nursing home, the section listing dosages and time of administration was physically cut out of the copied page, likely done to keep us from discovering that she may have gotten an extra dose or two of this or that.  I can only imagine the emotional turmoil of the nurse at the home. Should she pretend nothing happened and possibly have the lady die on her shift or risk having her shoddy nursing skill exposed by calling the paramedics? Eventually she must have decided to compromise and send the patient but cut out the important parts of her medication history, no doubt assuming that the doctors and nurses in the Emergency Department are a pack of morons.

Veterinary medicine at its finest. Patient alert, calm, but totally incoherent. Vitals normal and stable. Vitals of a seventeen-year-old Lithuanian virgin in fact. Nothing really wrong with her except that, and this may be a shock to many of you, she was 89, demented, and none of her many impressive medical problems went away or were cured as a result of our humble efforts. We sent her back after a relatively cheap four-thousand-dollar work-up no worse for the wear, with nothing to show for it but a few more cross-sectional images of her moth-eaten brain mouldering on a server somewhere in cyberspace.

3. Nine-month-old boy brought by his mother at three-in-the by-God-morning because he usually drinks five ounces of formula before bedtime but tonight, oh the horror, only drank three ounces before falling into the blissful sleep in whose gentle embrace I found him when I opened the door. Completely normal physical exam and negative review of systems.  And I mean completely negative. No fever, no coughing, no diarrhea, no nothing. I spent more time than you might imagine with this patient because I didn’t want to believe that anyone could possibly haul their baby out of bed in the dead of night, sit in a crowded waiting room with drug addicts and hookers, and then wait for three hours to tell a guy with 14 years of higher education that her baby was two ounces short of his usual daily formula intake.

She left angry because I was able to give her the good news that her baby was clean, well-fed, healthy, happy, and perfectly normal in every respect and that the CT scan she requested was definitely not necessary.

4. A 22-year-old-woman, eight weeks pregnant by date of last menstrual period, complaining of pelvic pain but eating fast food in her room and exhorting me to hurry up with the preliminaries and get to the ultrasound. Refused a pelvic exam (and I don’t care what some people say, a pelvic is important to work up pelvic pain), left several times to smoke outside, had a beta-HCG consistent with her estimated gestational age, and no real history or physical exam findings that would suggest she wanted anything other than a nice ultrasound picture of her baby to paste in her scrapbook. Putative father soon thrown out for rifling the IV cart for butterfly needles and syringes. Mother professing ignorance of babydaddy’s hyperkleptoremia and finally leaving without so much as a thank you after a perfectly normal eight-hundred-dollar ultrasound, on the taxpayer’s tab, of a perfectly normal eight week intrauterine pregnancy.

And no, I did not give her a picture to take home. Not unless she coughed up eight hundred bucks. All of our imaging is on a computer anyway. Grief all around. She had waited seven hours and almost had a total stranger stick his hands in her kooter fer’ nothing (which is what I heard her tearfully relate to her mamma on her cell phone).

5. 34-year-old women with a chief complaint of “knee pain.” slipped on the ice two weeks ago. Did not seek medical attention at the time. Gait normal. Exam unremarkable. Clinically no indication whatsoever for any imaging studies or for anything at all except a heartfelt, “Life sucks and you occasionally bang your knee,” which of course you can’t write on discharge instructions. Patient angry. Very angry. Storms out in an attempted elopement. In a demonstration in miniature of everythig that is wrong with the American health care system, I was sent to convince her to stay, eventually mollifying her with a completely normal three-view plain film of her offending knee. Reassurance all around. Motrin. Hasta la Vista. Come back if the pain gets worse or for the love of Mohammed, go see you primary care doctor, would ya’? (Can’t write that on discharge instructions either).

Fifteen minutes later, accosted by customer service representative.

“Can you give her a work excuse?”

“Sure. I guess it would be okay for her to rest today.”

“She want’s it for the last two weeks. She missed work and says her boss will fire her if she doesn’t get a doctor’s note.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Are you sure? Come on. All you have to do is sign it.”

“That’s called fraud where I come from…and I’m not going to get sucked into some worker’s comp scam.”

Consider these five of what I assure you are extremely typical patients. Each one with a totally bogus complaint which in a world ruled by common sense would have garnered nothing but laughter and a hearty, “You want to see the doctor for that? When pigs fly, buddy.”  And yet each one was duly triaged, sent back, given serious consideration, was worked up as if money were no object, and perhaps worst of all from the perspective of a resident or attending, required as much if not more paperwork and documentation than a patient with a legitimate complaint. The patient who had eloped from the hospital across town, for example, did not just leave but drew us into the usual Kabuki drama where we pretend he is a legitimate patient and exhort him to stay while he pretends to be a responsible citizen who is just exploring his health care options. Once again, in a perfect world we would have said, “Look, you stupid motherfucker. You were admitted to a perfectly decent hospital for your bogus complaint and they took you as seriously as if you weren’t just some hopped up dope addict. You took up a scarce bed, one that could have been filled by somebody who was really sick, and by eloping you spit in the face of both the overworked resident who admitted you and the busy attending who in laying hands on you assumed complete responsibility for your welfare in the hospital. You had it made. 47 million uninsured my ass. You and your shrew of a sister have never paid a dime for any of your extensive utilization of our health care system but you are such connoisseurs of our product that you act like you are bankrolling the entire shooting match.”

But you can’t say that. Each of these patients must be met with the same grim determination to diagnose and treat as any other.

Consider also that while these five patients represent obvious misuse of Emergency Services, most of the legitimate patients you will see, those with sincere medical complaints, will end up with a completely negative work-up or an embarrassingly weak admission leading to a work-up by someone else which is either negative or tells you exactly what you already knew and which may have been demonstrated several dozen times in the previous few years. I can’t tell you how many patients, for example, brought in for an exacerbation of their congestive heart failure whose symptoms were completely reversed after a few hours in the department (diuretics, oxygen) who are admitted and discharged a day or two later with a diagnosis of congestive heart failure exacerbation.

If you decide on Emergency Medicine, oh my gentle readers, scholars and adventurers all, you will see plenty of seriously injured and critically ill patients. But they will be intermixed with a huge volume of mundane medical complaints, some perfectly reasonable and some sublimely ridiculous, all of which you must wade through to get at the interesting cases. The stress of the job is not going to come from intubating the difficult airway or deciphering the mystery of an inexplicably decompensating patient whose life hangs from a thread passing through your hands. If you don’t like this kind of thing it would be criminally foolish to match into emergency medicine anyway, not to mention that at most Emergency Rooms these patient do not come in huge volumes but are an occasional treat to keep you interested and sharp.  The stress of the job comes from the sure knowledge that while you are in the trauma bay resuscitating the critical patient your backlog of drug seekers and vague abdominal complaints is inexorably growing and, as these are the financial bread and butter of our profession, they may not be ignored.

(This is an another article directed more to people who are interested in a medical career than to those already involved.  Feel free to read along but I again offer my usual warning that there is nothing profound or exciting to follow and I cannot be held responsible for your boredom. I’m going to try to write this without jargon and I will clearly explain everything which is where the boredom is going to come in for those of you who are in the know. -PB)

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Because I am a second year Emergency Medicine Resident, at my program I carry the trauma pager which alerts us whenever a trauma or a seriously sick patient is on the way.  As part of my training I get “first crack” at all these difficult patients, those for whom a delay of immediate interventions or decisions could result in serious long-term disability or death.  Our attendings supervise us but they generally stand back and only correct us if we are doing something either completely wrong or not the way they want to handle things.  It is the attending’s patient, not mine, even if she just stands in the back with her hands folded across her chest looking bored.  As we gain proficiency our attendings stand around looking bored more but to start out we are supervised fairly closely.

We really don’t get as many of this kind of difficult patient as you might imagine.  We get plenty of really, really sick and injured people but in most cases, they are stable enough where a delay of five minutes or even a half hour might not have too many serious consequences.  Most trauma patients that we receive for example, even Level One traumas for which the entire trauma team is mobilized, are stable enough to be taken to the CT scanner before the decision is made by the trauma surgeons whether to operate.  (On the other hand sometimes the patient is so badly injured, particularly in the case of penetrating abdominal injuries, that they go straight to the operating room with barely a how-do-you-do in the trauma bay).

The trauma pager usually but not always alerts us that a critical patient is on the way and gives us time to prepare.  In this case, the terse message on the pager screen said “57 M SVT Chest Pain” which meant that the paramedics were bringing in a 57-year-old man with chest pain who the paramedics believed to be in Supraventricular Tachycardia.  Supraventricular tachycardia, as the name implies, is a fast heart rate with the pacemaker, a focus of electrically active cells in the heart, located above the ventricles in either the atria (the top chambers of the heart) or the atrioventricular node (the specialized cells between the top and bottom chambers of the heart that allows the transmission of electrical signals). A rapidly firing pacemaker in the atrioventricular node is more correctly called an accelerated junctional escape rythm but it looks somewhat like SVT on an EKG.  The heart has a normal physiological pacemaker in the right atrium called the sinoatrial (SA) node but this is not what is usuall driving the heart in SVT.

The heart itself is an electrically active muscle. Unlike skeletal muscle, and with the exception of the SA node, it is not innervated but instead receives its signals to contract via a wave of electrical current generated by the flow of ions into and out of individual heart muscle cells.  The SA node is not directly innervated (attached to nerves) but is modulated with neurotransmitters like acetylcholine released from nerve endings of the parasympathetic nervous system (of rest and digest fame) located close to the SA node. The wave of electrical current produces a progressive cascade of electrical depolarization and repolarization of individual muscle cells, sequentially opening and closing voltage-gated ion channels on the cell surface, that allows the flow of sodium, potassium, and calcium to power the cellular machinary that causes contraction and relaxation.  Usually, this process is initiated in the sinoatrial node which has a natural automaticity and, absent any external influences from the autonomic nervous system, paces the heart at anywhere from 60 to 100 beats per minute.  Every heart cell can pace on its own but since the SA node paces faster, its signals interrupt the pacing potential of the rest through something called overdrive suppression.

I am simplifying things considerably and once in medical school you will learn about the heart in great detail.  Like many things in nature, the mechanism of cardiac activity is wonderfully elegant and simple to understand but frightfully complex once you get into the details.  The important thing to remember is that measurable electric current flows in the heart. An EKG is a representation of this current as it flows towards an electrode (also called a lead) and is more specifically the magnitude of the vector component of the current (well, actually the electrical potential which is a voltage) coming towards or moving away from the electrode.  The EKG, either on a monitor or printed on paper, is a graph of time and voltage with time represented on the horizontal axis and voltage on the vertical axis.  By convention, a printed EKG uses twelve leads, looking at the heart from twelve different electrical points-of-view.   A cardiac monitor like you see over hospital beds or on a portable defibrillator of the kind carried by paramedics is just an EKG with two or three leads instead of twelve.

A normally functioning heart has a distinctive EKG pattern representing the flow of current in the heart.  Abnormalities of the heart cause their own distinctive pattern on the EKG.  A Q-wave, for example, is an abnormal downward deflection on the EKG caused by the lead “looking” through dead (and therefore electrically silent) heart tissue to the opposite side of the heart and is something that develops after a heart attack in many patients.

The patient finally arrived and was a reasonably fit-looking middle-aged man sitting up in the gurney who was awake, alert, and in no obvious distress except he was dripping with sweat.  His chest pain and sweating had started about fifteen minutes before while working in his home shop sweeping sawdust into a dust pan.   The nurses, who actually do most of the work of patient care, hooked the patient up to our monitor and established another intravenous line to complement the one placed by the paramedics as I listened to the rest of the report and looked at the “rhythm strip” printed from their defibrillator.  It showed a wide-complex, monomorphic tachycardia with a rate of 280 beats-per-minute, also known as Ventricular Tachycardia or “V-tach,” not SVT as originally advertised (an earlier strip showed what could have been SVT however).  A normal heart rate is, as we said, anywhere from 60 to 100 beats per minute with an EKG pattern showing that the beat originates in the SA node.  This was a rhyhtm originating in the ventricle and pacing the heart at a rate three to four times normal.  It was “wide complex” because the QRS complex, the pattern of electrical force from the ventricle as represented on the EKG, was of a longer duration than a normal QRS indicating that the normal conduction pathway of the left ventricle (which provides the power stroke of the cardiac pump that sends blood to the body) was being bypassed.

The patient’s medical history was unremarkable, at least from our point of view although I have no doubt that many of my physician friends in Europe would have considered him marvelously complex and lucky even to be alive as this kind of patient is a rarity over there.  The usual COPD (from emphysema), the usual coronary artery disease with a history of two stents (expanded wire cages in the arteries of his heart to open them up and allow blood flow), and the usual non-insulin dependent diabetes.  He was a very pleasant guy and despite his chest pain cracked a few jokes and expressed a little dismay at all the trouble he was causing.  Not twenty feet away in another room was a patient a third his age with no medical problems whatsoever and  complaining vociferously to everyone and anybody about the slow service in our department which is typical and shows how profound are the generational differences of our patients.   Except for his sweating and fast heart rate, the rest of the physical exam was unremarkable.  He was on the usual medications for a guy with his medical problems and had no allergies.

Ordinarily we shock (or cardiovert) V-tach immediately if it is unstable.  Unstable arrhythmias are those producing symptoms; things like low blood pressure, altered mental status, obtundation (unconsciousness), chest pain, or sweating.  In our patient’s case, as he was somewhat stable (talking and perfectly alert) we decided to get everything we needed set up before attempting cardioversion which would certainly be required.  Nobody can maintain that kind of heart rate for long.  If he became unconscious, for example, maintaining an airway would be important so I set up for a possible endotracheal intubation (insertion of a breating tube through the vocal chords into the trachea) while the nurses drew up a couple of milligrams of Midazolam (Versed) for sedation before we jolted him.  I have had patients report that being cardioverted feels like being hit in the chest with a sledgehammer so sedation is the merciful thing to do for conscious patients.

No sooner had the Midazolam been injected into his intravenous line when he rolled his eyes and became limp and totally unresponsive.  The monitor still showed V-tach so now it was definitely time to shock him.  I set the defibrillator to 100 joules, was reminded by my attending to make sure the machine was set to synchronized cardioversion as shocking at the wrong place in the cardiac cycle can make the problem worse, pressed the charge button, and after checking that nobody was touching the patient, pressed the button with the lightning bolt on it and sent the charge into the pads that had been previously glued to his chest.   very satisfying jump from the patient (just like on TV) as every single cell in his heart depolarized, looked around at its neighbors, said “What the fuck?,” and waited for the regular signal coming from the SA node to resume a normal heart beat.

Which is exactly what happened.  After a brief period of asystole (or no electrical activity) the monitor showed a normal cardiac rhythm.  I made sure that the patient was still breathing and that he had a pulse and not thirty seconds later he opened his eyes and asked how he was doing.  In the meantime the cardiology fellow (an internist who is doing additional training to become a cardiologist) who we had previoulsy called arrived to evaluate the patient.   V-tach has many causes from electrolyte abnormalities to a tension pneumothorax (a collapsed lung with increasing pressure in the chest cavity compressing the heart) but in this case, given the presentation the most likely cause was cardiac ischemia which was confirmed by a post-cardioversion EKG showing unmistakable signs of myocardial infarction (a heart attack).   Ten minutes later and after starting an infusion of an antiarrhythmic agent the patient was on his way to the coronary catheterization lab for an emergent “heart cath.”

Total time in our department?  Ten minutes, fifteen at the most which made him both my quickest and most satisfying patient of the week and an official “Perfect Emergency Medicine Patient.”  By this I mean that he arrived with an unmistakable chief complaint, was able to give a good history, had solid physical exam findings, and responded to our intervention beautifully.  Not only that but he had a quick disposition and was taken off our hands early for definitive treatment.  We don’t get many of this kind of patient either.

My next patient was a 14-month-old with a fever, vomiting, and cough.  This is the worst kind of patient because while the child probably has nothing more serious than a cold or some self-limiting viral syndrome, the differential diagnosis is long and sometimes we keep a patient like this for hours and hours, eventually obtaining a perfectly normal lumbar puncture (where we stick a needle through the back to obtain spinal fluid to check for potentially deadly infections) before sending them home.

Perspective

Consider two separate rooms in the same Emergency Department. In one lies a young man who has been shot in the chest and arrived in full cardiac arrest with the paramedics frantically giving CPR. Red frothy bubbles come out of the gaping hole over his heart whenever the bag attached to his endotracheal tube is squeezed. A Full court press ensues and the trauma bay fills with interested bystanders watching the action as the patient is prepped for an emergent thoracotomy; a procedure where the chest is cut open to expose the heart and allow the repair of any obvious holes (as well as manual compression of the left ventricle to circulate blood).

In another room sits a sixteen-year-old girl, two weeks out from a tonsillectomy, with an emesis basin by her mouth and over which she has coughed or vomitted enough blood to cover the front of her dress. The room is empty except for the Emergency Physician, the nurse, and the anxious family.

Which case is more important? Surely the gunshot wound in the trauma bay is getting the most attention. It is an exciting case after all. It has everything one could possibly want. Blood, gore, violence, the cops, good guys, bad guys, and a young man whose life is hanging by such a fine thread that the Emergency Physician who is not in any way, shape or form a trained cardiothoracic surgeons is preparing to make a very large hole in a chest to perform rudimentary open-heart surgery. This is the stuff of which legends are made.
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“Say, Bob, remember that chest we cracked last month. Man. What a mess that was!”

The young girl in the other room? It’s just a post-tonsillectomy hemorrhage. Not exactly riveting stuff but I submit that this girl is the more important of the two cases. The guy in the trauma bay, after all, is dead and not likely to improve. He’s been shot through the heart or a great vessel and has been without oxygen to his brain for all but the first minute (the time it takes for his heart to pump most of his blood onto the street) of the last official twenty minutes of his life. There is probably nothing left upstairs to save even if circulation is restored. There is literally nothing to lose so everything possible is done and the trauma bay hums with frenzied activity even though the chances of even restoring spontaneous circulation with an emergent thoracotomy in a patient who arrives without vital signs is less than one percent. And only a small fraction of that less-than-one-percent ever leave the ICU except feet first for that last ride to the basement.

And yet this kind of thing defines Emergency Medicine as a specialty. The sixteen-year-old girl? How many of you contemplating Emergency Medicine as a career have ever though about this kind of patient? She seems pretty mundane and yet a patient like this is in mortal danger unless something is done and done quickly.

Everybody knows what to do in an exciting trauma. Big Things. Big Procedures. Lines, tubes, fluids, ventilators. Futile but extremely gratifying. How many of you have even considered how you’d handle a frightened sixteen-year-old rapidly bleeding to death and periodically vomitting another half-pint or two of blood. And no, it’s not as easy as you think. The girl could die. She’s sixteen. She isn’t supposed to die just yet. It’s just a tonsillectomy for which her otolaryngologist humorously prescribed ice-cream to make her throat feel better. If you let her die how will you explain it to the family?

“We did everything we could…I’m sorry,” doesn’t quite cut it in this case.

The moral? Emergency Medicine is not what you think. For every major trauma you are going to see a hundred garden-variety gastrointestinal bleeds, overdoses, strokes, heart attacks, ectopic pregnacies, sepsis and a large variety of other potentially life-threatening presentations. These will be woven into a day mostly spent dealing with relatively minor stuff like vague abdominal pain, headaches, and whatever complaint can be used to access the bounty of The Man. That’s just the way it is.

Whenever you get a major trauma, do you get your fair share of procedures (chest tubes, central lines, etc..) or do the surgical residents tend to take them?
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At our program, because it is a Level I trauma center, trauma surgery is in charge of most of the traumas. The EM residents manage the airway and do the initial assesment and stabilization in theory but in practice it is a joint effort with trauma surgery doing most of the heavy lifting. Trauma is not that complicated at our program. Unstable patients are stabilzed and taken to the OR. Stable patients are “pan-scanned” and trauma surgery elects to either operate, admit, or send home. We just sort of take their lead.

And we don’t get that much major trauma. We get a lot of trauma codes but they usually turn out to be nothing much. A lot of the level 1 trauma patients are actually discharged from the department. Determining the level of a trauma is a judgement call and any high speed rollover, for example, is often called at the highest level (level I) even if everybody was in seatbelts and walking on the scene (They still arrive on a back board, you understand.) It’s also a little bit political because to justify your funding as a Level I trauma center you have to see a certain number of Level I traumas. In other words, trauma patients are often upgraded to the next highest level but they are rarely downgraded.
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I have done some chest tubes but only one on a trauma patient. The rest were on medical codes of which my program sees plenty. Same with central lines and the like. Very few trauma patients get anything more than quick femoral lines which are not hard to place. I have done all of my many internal jugular and subclavian lines on critical medical patients both in the department and the ICU as well as most of the rest of my procedures. The only surgical airway I was in on (and I was just helping) was in the ICU. To date, I intubate more patients in the ICU than I do in the department. I probably intubated two or three times a night when on call in the ICU. A lot of the trauma patients arrive pre-intubated for our convenience as our city has superlative paramedics.
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It’s the medical codes that are difficult. Managing a decompensating dialysis patients with an exacerbation of his congestive heart failure secondary to his smoking crack is a lot more challenging than putting in a chest tube. Sorry. It is. We see a lot of this kind of patient and worse at my program.
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I confess that I am not yet very good at managing trauma patients. There are usually two or three attendings in the trauma bay along with every single surgery resident in the hospital so I’m afraid I am somewhat intimidated…what, after all, do I have to add to the high level brainpower there assembled? It’s a case of too many pimps, not enough hoes. Paradoxically, in the ICU where there are seldom any attendings or other residents around except those standing around waiting for somebody to take charge, I am completely comfortable managing a critical care patient running south for the border. And occasionally when I go up there (the EM residents are on the hospital code team) the ICU nurses take me aside and ask me to put in the lines because they really need access and they’re not that confident that the family medicine and internal medicine residents on call are up to the task of getting them in quickly.

ICU nurses like Emergency Medicine residents because we like to aggressively manage patients and are not afraid of procedures. They don’t like sitting on a dangerously unstable patient with only tenuous peripheral access and a shoddy airway. It makes their already difficult job even more difficult.

Trauma for Emergency Medicine is easy and somewhat over-rated (uh, once you get the hang of it, I mean). It’s just ATLS and that’s about it. Besides, if it’s serious there is nothing to manage as they are quickly taken to the operating room where they become surgery patients. They do not come back to the Emergency Department. The exit is one-way only.

The critical skills (other than not losing your cool) in trauma are managing the airway, recognizing the causes of your patients respiratory and hemodynamic instability, and correcting them. So if you know your ABCs, the skills you need are intubation, needle decompression, chest tube, FAST exam, pericaridocentesis, and central venous access. That will cover you for 99 percent of what you see and then the patient will go to the OR or the morgue.
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We rotate on the trauma service, by the way.
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One of my favorite television programs is “Trauma: Life in the ER.” But to be fair the show should be called “Trauma: Life in the ER as a Trauma Sugery Resident” as that’s who they are usually following. Emergency medicine, except at the big urban war zones, is not really that trauma-intensive. Everybody likes a really goopy gore-fest of course (we’re only human) but most Emergency Medicine residents will see many, many more massive GI bleeds than they will gunshot wounds. Panda’s Axiom Number Two: Blood coming out of a hole in the chest is cool. Out of the rectum not so much.

And a massive upper-GI bleed of which I have seen two in the last week is a lot more unsettling than most traumas.

(The following article is directed primarily at those contemplating matching into Emergency Medicine. Those of you who are not may read it but I make no apologies for targeting a particular group of readers. Emergency Medicine has become a very popular specialty lately so I’m sure there is some interest out there. Most of my patients, by the way, even those who know how physicians are trained, don’t know that Emergency Medicine is a specialty. The more chatty ones often ask me what specialty I am going into. Even many of my relatives, and they should know better because I do talk to them now and then, think that Emergency Medicine is something doctors do when they can’t decide on a specialty or if they aren’t smart enough to do anything else.

I am at a small, community program as opposed to a major urban trauma center so our patient mix leans more towards the medical and not surgical/trauma. Not to say that we don’t see some trauma but it’s usually blunt trauma and not penetrating. In other words, I’m just giving you my own perspective. I shouldn’t have to issue any caveats but invariably I’m going to get a ton of irate emails insisting that they do things differently at their program.-PB)

Speed

Emergency Medicine is a specialty of speed. Everything needs to be done not only quickly but with an economy of effort that separates the important things about the patient from those that are interesting but not particularly relevant. Victory is declared when the patient has a quick disposition; either treated and sent home, transfered, or admitted to the hospital. Ultimate victory occurs when the patient actually leaves the department. Take for example the typical suicidal patient who has made a lame, self-centered gesture at self-termination. In medical school you are conditioned to explore this kind patient in incredible detail. Consequently, as a new resident your first instinct is to get a detailed psychiatric history, delving deeply into the mileu of the patient’s life to assess his motivations. In reality however, your meaningful discussion with the patient is useless and is only going to delay his final disposition. You know he is going to be involuntarily committed and the sooner he can get somewhere, anywhere, where he can be evaluated by a skilled psychiatrist the better. It’s the psychiatrist’s job to do this kind of thing and he can run circles around you and your rudimentary knowledge of his field. Not only that but as the patient flaps his gums and you pretend to be interested you are falling way, way behind on the eight or nine patients you are working up.

The relevant questions then become, “Did you try to kill yourself, how many pills and of what type did you take, and what do I have to do and what tests need to be ordered to quickly medically clear you for a transfer to an appropriate mental health facility?” The patient usually wants to spill his guts (and if he doesn’t the parents or the loved ones are happy to oblige) but while it is important to be polite, we don’t have the time to hear how you were mistreated as a child. All I want to know is your acetaminophen level and whether it is rising or falling. Not toxic and decreasing? Nice meeting you. I hope you like mushy food and communal televsion. It’s been real. Buh bye.

The idea is to get a disposition. Since we don’t treat long-term psychiatric problems in our Emergency Departement, there is no point in wasting effort. It’s best just to get them out of the department. On the other hand we do treat a variety of medical complaints and on these you need to use the traditonal physician skills of history, physical exam, assessment, and plan. But relatively quickly. It’s a little more complicated than just differentiating lethal from non-lethal complaints but you need to ellicit a chief complaint and tailor your history and physical exam to expose it. Obviously the history should be the longest component of your encounter but even there you can get carried away. I once found myself sitting at a the computer sifting through a patient’s records trying to determine the dates of his seven heart caths at which point I realized that I was eating up time, I wasn’t a medicine resident, and maybe all I really needed was the date of his last heart cath and an old EKG or two to see if anything had changed.

“History of Coronary artery disease with seven stents, last on 2/5/06” is perfectly servicable for the purposes of emergency medicine. If we need more detail we can always get it. You cannot do a six-page medicine-style History and Physical on every patient, even the really sick ones. The typical EM physician works on around four patients per hour so you see how this would be prohibitively costly in time. It is true that some patients present with relatively minor complaints but there is a certain baseline level of paperwork involved with every patient independent of the acuity level.

So you need to be quick and that is one of the skills our attendings try to develop in us. This does not mean, however, that you cut corners. You just need to learn what corners to avoid. Being able to juggle a lot of things at one time is also an essential skill. Every resident in every specialty has to do this to a certain extent but what other residents consider a hectic day is just another routine shift for us. That’s the beauty and the curse of Emergency Medicine. The hours are good. Fantastic for residents even by regular job standards. Now that I am working full-time in the department I rarely go over fifty hours a week and some weeks I barely go over forty. The tradeoff is that we work very hard when we are working. There is seldom time to sit down and there is also no such thing as a break. As long as there are charts in the rack (new patients to be seen, I mean) you have work to do. There are always charts in the rack. There’s a crisis out there or didn’t you get the memo?

Emergency medicine isn’t the hardest job in America, not by a long shot, but I think we have one of the few jobs in the developed world where you can get to the end of a twelve-hour day and realize that you haven’t sat down, had anything to drink, or urinated since before you came on. I know that surgery and medicine residents put in more hours and I have nothing but respect for them but being at the hospital is not the same thing as actually working. In fact, many of the residents in the time-intensive specialties spend a good deal of their time sitting around bitching about how tough they have it which is something that Emergency Medicine residents never have time to do. We’re too busy. We complain of course, but not about staying at the hospital for no reason after our work is done. There is always a reason for us to be there when we are at work; they call it the waiting room. We come to work expecting to work.

But we do get to go home. At first I didn’t believe it was possible but now I am begining to accept the fact that nobody expects us to hang around after out shift is over. Sure, we have to tie up loose ends and ensure that our more complicated patients have a disposition but nobody ever says, “Hey, why don’t you stick around an extra four or five hours in case we get busy.”

My point? If you believe that you’d like Emergency Medicine because you don’t have to work hard you are going to be disappointed. If you like to work hard but also like to have regular hours and a predictable schedule with some time off to think about other things, you are going to be very happy as an Emergency Medicine resident. But thinking of Emergency Medicine as a “lifesyle” residency as is common among medical students contemplating specialty choices would be a mistake. It’s only a lifestyle specialty if you like that kind of lifestyle.

(Next: A Typical Shift For a Typical Resident)