Digoxin abortion gone awry….or did it?

Emergency medicine has to be one of the most diverse fields of medicine out there. Each day is a whirlwind of activity and patients, ranging from cardiac arrests down to the broken fingernail. Not only are we responsible for the most critically ill, the walking wounded and the patients that have nowhere else to go, but also are faced with the complications encountered in the outpatient setting. This could be a patient fresh from the chiropractor that is having neck pain, can’t move their arm and now have a carotid dissection; or a patient from a outpatient surgi-center that had local anesthesia but is now seizing; or in the case below a patient that underwent an elective abortion and now is hypotensive and bradycardic.

Lunate and perilunate dislocations

A weekend warrior trying to finish up painting that last side of the house takes a tumble off his ladder and lands on his left hand.  He has a palpable deformity on the volar aspect of the distal radius and painful active and passive ROM but is otherwise neurovascularly intact with no median nerve neuropathy.  The …

Throwin’ shade at the POKER Trial

There’s been a lot of chatter in the twitterverse surrounding the recent release of the POKER Trial out of Australia comparing ketofol with propofol for procedural sedation.  Their primary outcomes were looking at respiratory complications, including apnea, desaturation or hypoventilation; with secondary outcomes of hypotension and patient satisfaction.  They report “ketofol and propofol resulted in a …

Blunt chest trauma

Being in a car accident, even the most benign one imaginable, can be stressful for patients. Inherently, if they have any chest pain they’re going to be convinced they’ve sheared their aorta right off its hinges. While that may be of concern to them, we are pretty certain that their aorta is still intact if they still are alive, but did they sustain a cardiac contusion? How do we even figure out if they had one? And what the heck do we do with them if they did in fact have a cardiac contusion?