Tuesday, July 17, 2012

ACLS: An Algorithm for Medical Students

10 comments:

  1. I like this. I had my first resuscitation last week. It was not pleasant by anyone's account.

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  2. If I didn't know better, I'd say you based that on my first cardiac arrest on the ambulance. Except you'd have forgotten when the medic asked to borrow my stethescope and it took me thirty seconds to realize that 1. she was talking to me 2. the stethescope really existed and was in my pocket and 3. she expected me to be able to get the stethescope out of my pocket, hand it to her and still keep track of the two minutes I was supposed to be timing.

    You nailed the rest of it though, at least from an EMT view - if you discount the fact I haven't learned ECG's yet.

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  3. They forgot "elbow past the other 17 residents that showed up." in there somewhere. We just had a code the other night, and I swear every resident, every hospitalist, 4 phlebotomists, 3 respiratory therapists, a chaplain, the house super, a surgeon, and a couple of the IV team nurses showed up. All this after they made a BIG deal about reducing the number of people that show up to codes, and forced the critical care RNs to wear construction worker vests, to be identified more easily...

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  4. When we run codes, the medical students are usually pushed into the chest compression rotation pretty early on. Probably due to some sadistic desire on the part of the doc who is eventually running the code to yell at them for doing shitty compressions.

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  5. This was too freaking hilarious. Soooooo true.

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  6. This cracked me up - thanks!

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  7. Hillarious, and true to life. Also, if your arms hurt when doing chest compressions you are doing it wrong. Of course, doing it wrong is part of being a medical student.

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  8. After I failed my ACLS certification I complained to my ICU attending that my problem was "change code status" was never an option on the multiple choice test.

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  9. hahahaha, oh my gosh, love this.

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  10. I'm on my peds rotation in 3rd year... This is exactly how it went down. How many codes did you guys go through like this before you actually could be useful?

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