I’ll Never Forget the Experience
We had a patient recovering from a rare drug reaction where skin blisters uncontrollably. His whole body was swollen. Even with the swelling, his vitals are stable. We were scratching our heads when his leg burst. Where the swelling had occurred has now split open and is gushing.
The nurse and my co-resident throw on gloves and apply pressure while I grab a surgical kit and try to find the source. Another minute or two later and they’ve found they found the ruptured vein. I think on the repeat blood work that evening he’d lost maybe 10-20% of his blood in five minutes.
Now we had to treat the infection. This patient was pretty frail and had already had a near-fatal reaction to one class of antibiotics. It was a bad day that got worse with all the other medical problems he was having. It was just too much and we transferred to palliative. Canuck147