Well so not many blog worthy things have been going on, really. After my wild vaca, everything else is just...boring. Today was my 12th day in a row to work. That's not really that much compared to some people, but I'm happy to have the weekend off to catch up on sleep (seeing as how I did not do that on my vaca).

So today in a big case, the scrub tech had an asthma attack. She was in her sterile gown and couldn't touch anything, so I got the inhaler that automatically comes with my drug tray and gave her some puffs of albuterol-all without touching anything but her mask and her mouth. Asthma attacks are nothing to mess around with. Many a asthmatic has died because they waited too long before they got help. I had a patient (who smokes) just last week go into bronchospasm in the middle of the case. I couldn't get her to oxygenate through her breathing tube and her lung pressures were way high. Scared me to death. Got through it, though. Long term smokers don't do too well with surgery.

So one of our interns has a 6 month old baby that was fine and dandy until a month ago when the baby suddenly collapsed and quit breathing. She and her husband (both doctors) resuscitated the baby at home and got her to the hospital. She survived but has a very bad congenital heart problem that no one knew about. Her only chance is a heart transplant. They have decided to forego surgery and bring her home on hospice. I was thinking today what a brave decision that was for them. I know it was really difficult and I hope they don't question their decision 10 years from now, wondering, "if only we had..." They saved their baby a lot of suffering in exchange for their own.