Mar 29, 2012
— read in fullA surgical story
Surgical trainee, Dr. Pete Straker, describes an emergency situation he was confronted with just a couple of weeks after becoming a doctor.
A pregnant 18-year old girl, who has just been in a road accident, is sitting up in front of me chatting happily with her boyfriend. I know things are not so happy for her, as her chest x-ray had a whiteout between her lungs where the heart should clearly be seen. There are lots of causes for this appearance but if you have just had a car crash all probability points to a bleeding aorta, the big blood vessel that runs from the heart supplying the rest of the body.
The CT scan confirms our suspicions, her heart rate is slowly rising, suggesting that she is still bleeding. All the senior members of my team are in theatre operating, I am totally on my own and I only qualified two weeks ago.
She laughs and seems so happy; I hope that her laughter does not raise her blood pressure and blow off the clot on her aorta, which would be fatal. She desperately needs open-heart surgery, I phone every hospital that can do this and there is nowhere with a bed, I even cast the net as far as Southampton, nothing.
Then finally I find that Harefield has an intensive care bed available, so I get put through to the senior doctor, a registrar, who is on site. He dismisses my request, claiming that I am too junior to make the referral, so he tells me to taxi over the scans. I refuse, as the two-hour delay may kill the girl. Harefield is the Real Madrid of heart surgery places, Prof. Jacoub used to work there, widely considered to be the best surgeon ever. When he retired, they had to replace him with the best, and as with football teams, Harefield scouted internationally and poached France’s top surgeon, Prof. Dreyfuss. He is on call tonight; he is the one who can get me access to that vital bed.
Can I really call this great doctor at three in the morning? I look at the girl, stupid question, of course I can. The line rings. 'Allo?' I explain everything; he calms me down and thanks me for ringing. The girl has open-heart surgery two hours later. The next time I saw her she was in the obstetric ward preparing to give birth.
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