I can’t seem to sleep, and this is just hovering on my mind so I’m just gonna vent about it here; I don’t ever use Tumblr anyway.
I’ve been working at NYU Langone Medical Center’s Neuro ICU for the past 10 months or so. Obviously I did it to make my resume look nice, but also because I really do care about medicine and the career path that I chose. But it turned out to be so much more than an internship. It’s shown me so much and taught me so much more than I expected. So I want to write down the top 5 memorable things that I have seen in those short 10 months, which is practically my first 10 months in the field (in no specific order or ranking).
1. There was this 53 year old guy who had two daughters in the USA Under 21 Women’s Olympic skiing team (I know this because there was a picture of them hanging in his room with a note from them both). I looked at his head CT scans, and he had possibly the biggest subarachnoid hemorrhages that I had ever seen. His neurologist and hematologist walked into his room, and talked with my boss (a neurointensivist) about his prognosis, and they decided to withdraw care. I left the room as his wife walked into the ICU. He was my dad’s age.
2. I was working on some database entry outside the Neuro ICU lounge where families can just relax and sit down for a moment because it was empty, and it’s got a kickass view, so why the hell not. This family of 6 or 7, mother was about 60 years old, her kids and grandkids walked in. From what I overheard her husband had a ischemic stroke, and she got calls after calls and had to regurgitate what had happened to him, and what will happen to him (stroke patients usually never recover 100%). She started out okay, but by the time she had stopped answering calls, she was bawling her eyes out.
3. My boss and I looked over this woman’s head CT. She had something called a glioblastoma multiforme. It’s one of the most common and most aggressively malign brain tumors out there. The patient had no idea yet, because she had come in with something else and ended up coding in a regular floor. My boss was waiting to tell her until her family came, so she basically just did a routine neuro exam and walked out. The patient thanked her over and over again for her great care, and smiled through the whole thing. I remember imagining how she and her family would feel once they heard the news. She was in her early 30s. Just married.
4. This one guy, had to be in his 50s fell and had a hemorrhage in his head. Usually it’s not really a big deal but he started bleeding into his ventricles and his cerebrospinal fluid started filling with blood, which can lead to infections and other complications. So my boss was just keeping him in the ICU intubated for preventive measures. But he was awake and conscious, so he kept on thrashing at his tubes and started pointing his finger to my boss and wrote out on a whiteboard saying ‘you’re a liar’ because my boss had told him that he *might* be able to get extubated that day. His family was unbelievably rude to her, and she never put her smile off and told him she was sorry, wrapped up her routine and moved onto the next patient.
5. This lady in her 70s, conscious and spritely, and possibly one of the funniest patients I’ve seen had an aneurysm that was about to burst. So this neurosurgeon came in with the biggest, warmest smile on his face and explained to her what he was going to do in the operating room. When the surgeon left, she was 100% assured that she was going to live. It was fucking incredible. She was just told that someone was going to cut her head open, use a burning clip to cut a bulging vein out of her inner brain and sew her head back up using staples.
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
andulkaphoto
areudirty
vaporwave
ellievsbear
