Finity

This is snipped from a comment made to one of my previous posts:

"A hospital emergency room sent my mother [she was not fat, quite thin and petit] home with a broken arm (in two sharp pieces) with no more than bandages and a sling. It took over a week to get an appointment with a real doctor in his office. As soon as he saw the xrays he had her in surgery as quickly as possible."

This is not the last time you will hear of such a thing. I decry it. Yes, hospital emergency rooms are overcrowded and the nurses, technicians, and doctors who work these probably often feel that they are merely pushing a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down again after all that vain effort made to get it to the summit.

But there is no excuse sometimes.

They first arrived at the emergency room with a complaint of shoulder pain and a feeling of "whooshing" in the chest. Labwork, chest X-ray, and EKG showed nothing unusual, so they were sent home.

A week later the pain had worsened and radiated into the abdomen. A CAT scan showed an enormous aortic aneurysm that extended from the aortic root all the way down below the kidneys. The original aortic lumen was actually smaller than the secondary along some stretches, and the secondary had calcified somewhat. One of the kidneys was fed blood supply not solely by the original aortic lumen but by the aneurysm lumen also.

A vascular surgeon of national reputation was called immediately to Gore-Tex the aorta from the root over the arch and down. Coronary and carotid arteries were re-attached through the new Gore-Tex. The operation, which must have been spectacular, took eight hours. After being on a pump all that time the patient went into Torsades and had to be shocked once or twice; irritable cardiac muscle and all that. A second-degree heart block later came and went.

After that things went as well as could be expected. The patient was relatively young and had no prior health issues or history to cause worry. The chest tube came out, the pleural rub dissipated spontaneously. The new aortic valve sounded wonderful, and the patient was walking laps in the hallways. A supportive family was very gracious and helpful to both the patient and the staff.

Prior to the operation the patient was your typical walking time bomb and they could have dropped dead any moment if the aneurysm had ruptured.

I would not want to have been the ER doctor that sent the patient home the first time they presented, but I suppose they had nothing really to go on.