Thursday, January 21, 2016

The strangest thing come up over the OR table


My resident was talking about Mason City, for some reason, and I ended up saying that I was there briefly but got carbon monoxide poisoning there.

For the rest of the surgery, my attending just kept repeating, "You could have died.  You could have died. YOU COULD HAVE DIED!"

Her hands slammed down and shook a bit as she was holding instruments and staring at my masked face. And I didn't know what else to say after that.

I used my five minutes of break to search on PubMed/UptoDate again for carbon monoxide poisoning for the first time since last year. I thought I was over it. Guess not.

I then got really scared that my heart palpitations/chest pain I've been experiencing recently is related to myocardial injury from CO poisoning, which is apparently very common even in young people with no heart disease, and is related to 2x increased mortality. It's unpredictable, just like long term neurological sequelae.

 And then my day got a lot worse.

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