Skip to main content

Sleep deprivation and doctor's notes

I'm no stranger to being awake for a 24-30 hour straight shift, but last night the sleepy delirium hit me in the middle of writing my admission note. During these wakeful-sleep moments, my brain tends to move from relevant thoughts to far off tangents. If my hands are on a computer keyboard when that happens...well, you'll see:

59 yo M with history of IPF admitted with dyspnea
1. Dyspnea - not likely IPF flare as able to wean very quickly. Would get an ICU overflow bed
- CT chest to evaluate nodule seen on CXR
- Sputum, blood cultures
- continue O2
- PRN albuterol-ipratropium
- continue prednisone/albuoterl as a guest speker
- would also like to add rifaximine. 
2. Lower extremity swelling - inadequate dose of lasix vs hypotension. dkl;
- will give IV vanc at 116%
-
3. Cor Pulmonale - Will get RHC, orthostatics, and WBC count together day? 
4. SIADH - stable, serial BMP 
5. Compression fracture - will continue home medications for pain. 
FEN/GI - Will give patient 3 g 5 CHO diet, low Na 
Dispo - Hpatient iwth risk of rincreased infection to due low of be louie s

What is really scary is that I knew I was sleepy and was actually making "corrections" to my mistypes. I can only imagine what kind of plan I would have had if I hadn't edited it.

Needless to say, a fellow resident caught my note in the morning, and I rewrote the whole thing.


Popular posts from this blog

Learning Leadership

This past Thursday-Friday was the annual Internal Medicine Residency PGY-2 (means a second year resident) Leadership Retreat. At the retreat, we had several lectures, breakout discussion sessions, and role play practice in how to employ leadership skills that help foster a positive learning and working environment. The lecture and discussion series was led by facilitators who have been trained through the Stanford Faculty Development Center and utilizes their Clinical Teaching Program curriculum. The focus was for how we, as residents, can facilitate a positive learning environment for incoming interns and for medical students on the team. It also focused on how to set goals for an inpatient team, and how to best use your attending as a resource. Overall, it was a great retreat. Though many people think that some people are natural born leaders, I think many leadership qualities, if not most, can be learned and trained. Sometimes those who have had some kind of training or learning in...

The Sterile Field

In 1847, maternal mortality from childbirth in a Hungarian clinic was approximately 18%. A second clinic that offered maternity services had numbers much nearer to 2%. Women begged for admission to the second clinic in order to avoid puerperal fever, the name of the illness associated with such significant death rates. At the First Clinic, medical students and physicians routinely performed autopsies as well as patient services, including maternity services. At the Second Clinic, midwives did delivery and did not participate in any autopsies. Following the death of a colleague who became sick with puerperal fever after being stuck with an autopsy scalpel, a physician named Ignaz Semmelweis inferred that cadaveric particles must cause puerperal fever, and that students and physicians were transferring them to mothers after doing autopsies. After instituting the practice of handwashing in the First Clinic, the mortality dropped from 18.3% in April of 1847 to 1.9% in August that same year...

The $2000 monkey on my back, deferred

It’s been more than a week, and I think an update is due. Plus, I can give updates on my own status with my heart murmur, having seen the doctor this past Friday. The only thing that has kept me from updating until now is simply laziness (in other words, I was far too busy studying/eating/cleaning/sleeping to actually relax and write). This past Friday I went to the Student Health Center to see my doctor about the previously mentioned murmur recently discovered. My doctor presumed it was most likely an innocent flow murmur, which occurs if a heart valve doesn’t close all the way or in time when the heart beats, allowing blood to flow back the opposite way, and the blood causes turbulence heard as noise. If you’ve ever heard turbulent water flowing over and through rocks and back upstream in eddies in a river, you should get the idea of what a murmur is. It was recommended that I have an echocardiography done, or an ultrasound picture of my heart. This would allow us to see exactly how ...