In comes a 34-year-old male who is obtunded with pinpoint pupils and breathing at five times a minute; likely due to heroin abuse. He wakes up after Narcan is appropriately administered, but now he wants to leave. What is the risk of death if he leaves? Do we restrain him against his will to monitor him …
Let’s face it, we’ve all done it. And, believe me when I tell you all the cool cats are doing it, too. Of course, I am referring to the use of whole blood to determine a woman’s pregnancy status in the Emergency Department using the urine pregnancy test strip. Did you know that the common …
Read more “Just because she cannot pee, does not mean “No UCG””
Placing central venous cathethers, whether under ultrasound guidance or based off of your landmarks can be difficult and still prone to many complications. With the increased use and now standard of care for placing central lines with ultrasound guidance you would think we are immune to the “catastrophic” complication of an inadvertent arterial cannulation. But does ultrasound make us infalliable? Are there other methods that we can use to confirm venous placement of these large catheters?
Quick Review of Lisfranc Injuries Lisfranc injures are a spectrum which result in a sprain or complete disruption of the tarsometatarsal joints of the midfoot. They most commonly occur at the base of the 2nd metatarsal with oftentimes subtle or even absent findings on standards x-ray views, especially when they result from low velocity injury. What is mechanism of …
The ALTO program (Alternatives to Opioids) at St. Joe’s has already received national recognition for its work here. In March we held a legislative summit that was attended by U.S. Senators Bob Menendez, Cory Booker, US Congressman Bill Pascrell, Jr and multiple other members of the local and state government to discuss the opioid epidemic and the ALTO initiative. Then we were lucky enough to have the New York Times write a story recent story in June on the ALTO program as well. Not to be outdone, EM Resident recently published a piece to introduce the EMRA readers to the wonders of ALTO and the success we have had thus far with the program, check it out here.
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.
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 …
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 …
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?
Having pus in your brain is a problem no matter how you cut it, but finding it in there can be a challenge. While the classic triad is usually fever, headache and a focal neuro deficit, this isn’t always present. Dave Traficante (@davetraf) just published a pretty cool case of bifrontal brain abscesses in the International Journal of Emergency Medicine of a gentlemen with this very problem. Interestingly, he didn’t have any focal neuro deficits, but he did have a very flat affect and could care less of the pus accumulating in his brain which coincided with the frontal lobe location of his abscesses.
In this installment of the Tox Box Journal Club we are going over three articles reviewed at the NYC Poison Control Center in Manhattan last week. Two of the articles discuss utility of lipid emulsion therapy in animal models and a third on the deleterious effects of methotrexate dosing errors in Australia.
The weather is finally starting to warm up and the fish are biting. Unfortunately, amateur and pro fishermen alike will also either catch themselves or their friend while out on the waterways this summer. While a small fishhook lodged in a finger may seem trivial compared to some of the more traumatic injuries we see, …
Typically when we start talking about anything related to fat embolisms our minds go immediately to trauma and long bone fractures as the cause, but this isn’t always the case. The constellation of signs and symptoms of respiratory insufficiency, neurologic dysfunction and petechial rash which are typically associated with fat embolism syndrome can also be caused by pancreatitis, sickle cell disease and liposuction; all of which show up regularly in the Emergency Department. With mortality rates as high as 20%, despite the fact that FES usually doesn’t present for at least 12 hours after the initial event, it should be something that we are aware of.
Correct, we don’t have terlipressin in the US, yet… Hopefully, sometime in the not so far off future we’ll have the chance to play around with it. Essentially it’s a synthetic analog of vasopressin which we are more familiar with. There’s some written about its use in variceal bleeds and here is a cool little study from Egypt using it for refractory septic shock.
It’s difficult to miss a raging STEMI or a CVA with unilateral flaccid paralysis, but there are other, less-sexy diagnoses that we have the opportunity to make in the Emergency Department that can be as important and impactful to the patient’s health. Endophthalmitis is a difficult word to spell and equally as difficult to diagnose if you’re not …