Kyle Kelson, Downstate/Kings County Emergency Medicine resident.
@kelsonmd
In 2001, the only drug to treat sepsis was approved by the FDA and swiftly brought to market by Eli Lilly & Co. So, why have most residents never heard of Xigris (drotrecogin alfa)? By Dr. Lee Grodin [1] Bloomberg News. Lilly Read more…
It’s 15 minutes from change of shift, and you are recovering from a busy overnight in the critical care area of the ED. Suddenly, an intubated patient rolls in the door without prior notification, and EMS is performing chest compressions. “Intubated… three rounds of epinephrine and one round of bicarb Read more…
“He took all his medication,” you chuckle to yourself as you read the chief complaint on the board. “Man, isn’t that what we try to get all our patients to do?” As you open up the patient’s chart, however, your smugness quickly turns to unease when you read through the triage Read more…
The Background At elevation, the body needs to adapt to the decreased partial pressure of oxygen. In the short term adaptations include tachycardia, hypertension and hyperventilation. These physiologic alterations are usually enough to prevent serious physiological distress. However, if ascent occurs rapidly, individuals can become acutely ill, displaying a typical Read more…
It’s a quiet night in the critical care area of the ED, and you are engaging in stimulating and academic discussion with your attending and junior resident about the merits of cinema in the 1980s. Just as you broach the subject of Steven Spielberg’s ET the Extra-Terrestrial, the red phone Read more…
It’s 4am in the emergency department, and you’ve finally reached a lull in the onslaught of patients after having finally successfully bailed out the flood from the afternoon. An individual very familiar to you and the rest of the department pops up on the board. Despite the risk of crashing Read more…
Working in the ED is a shiftwork job, which for many, is part of the draw. We never get paged after hours. We work less overall hours than many of our physician colleagues in other fields. And we can avoid crowds when we run errands or enjoy popular attractions on weekdays Read more…
Have you ever given a patient a shot of ketorolac just because it’s “something they couldn’t take at home?” How about the use of a “therapeutic X-ray?” Placebos have been used by healers since the advent of medicine, likely far before being formally labeled “physician.” In the United States, there Read more…
You’re working a peds shift when a concerned pair of parents brings their three year old child in with a swollen, red, warm bump on his forearm. They first noticed it yesterday, and it has progressively gotten larger. He’s not irritable, but his arm seems to be bothering him. You Read more…
A 52-year-old man with diabetes, hypertension, end-stage renal disease on dialysis, and CAD presents to the ED with sudden onset of shortness of breath. He endorses missing his last dialysis session because he left the country for a week and was forced to pay for his last session out-of-pocket in Read more…