Caffeine Free in Med 3

Excessive talking helps

You never know how much making random friends will help you out. Here's an excellent example yesterday. Or maybe it just showed how weird med student life is.

So I woke up Tuesday morning not feeling so hot. I ate breakfast, headed to the hospital, and then found out the first 2 surgeries were canceled so we had a few hours to kill. My stomach had felt sort of upset, but I ate my animal crackers and diet sprite anyway. Then I started puking. I reached the point where it was pretty much just dry heaves. After 4 hours of this, I was the color of paper, woozy, passing out in the restroom, and propping myself up on various walls.

Fortunately I had struck up conversations with one of the anesthesia residents at earlier visits. After establishing that I was so dehydrated it was tough to even find a vein (opps, too much studying and not enough drinking), I got my very own liter of Lactated Ringer's running into my arm. We ran that baby in so fast that we almost blew my vein and I ended up with quite the bruise afterward. The resident also made sure that I informed my attending who sent me home since there were no actual surgeries that day.

Good thing too. I had a 100+ temperature and wasn't at all appropriate to be around patients, even if I didn't look like death warmed over.

Moral of the story: be nice to everyone, even those not on your rotation. You never know when you'll be so dehydrated that someone needs to put an IV in you. Just make sure you have the anesthesia resident, not the PMR resident.

Labels: dehydration, IVs, residents, sick, surgery

posted by Allie @ 8:18 PM