Tired and afraid
'Tired and afraid' is a poem that could be about any one of a number of patients I have met over the past few years. But its not. It's about a man I recently met whose words are hard to forget. I doubt I was of much help.
It’s not a bird or a plane…
18 year old man day 7 in ICU after jumping from a building. Tracheostomy performed the day before. Acute respiratory distress with inability to pass a suction catheter through the tracheostomy tube.
Weingart on Pelvic Trauma
LITFL asks Scott Weingart for his take on the approach to the hemodynamically unstable pelvic fracture. The end result: a high yield mini-podcast. Enjoy!
Jess Bernard Weiss
Jess Bernard Weiss (1917 – 2007) was an American anesthesiologist. Best known for designing the Weiss needle for the placement of epidural catheters
Smith, Bell, and the Art of Observation
Sir Sydney Smith had humble beginnings in a village at the heart of the Otago gold fields, near the southern tip of New Zealand. After a stint in the New Zealand Army during the First World War and a colourful career as a medical investigator in colonial Egypt, he went on to hold the Chair of Forensic Medicine in Edinburgh.
The power of social media leads to reversal
Christopher Watford contacted the LITFL team with a query regarding a Visual Aid Question (VAQ) from the first sitting of the 2007 examination ACEM examination. We set about investigating the query using the power of social media… For me, this…
Glandular Alphabetum
Pathology must be really boring sometimes...all that purple and pink and cold laboratory environment. So who can blame them for being excited when they chance upon a pareidolic experience, a Wolkenkuckucksheim if you like where the pathologist finally has the chance to say 'Bad news: you have a tumor. Good news: it’s really cute!'
A Letter to a Young Emergency Doctor
When I was starting out, I was told there were three types of doctors doing emergency medicine: missionaries, adrenaline junkies, and fools. I was all three...
Along came a spider
Black widow spider bites, while rare enough in the actual world, are often present at ABEM General. How many know what to do for these patients when they present to the ED?
Twenty Twitter Rules
Gregory Miller, MD is a Twitter recent-adopter and provides Twenty Twitter Rules from 'the novice perspective' on getting involved in #FOAMed Twittersphere
Freudian Slap
Overnight I was confronted by an angry and aggressive middle-aged male weighing 183kg (400lb). Obesive: descriptive term for corpulent persons prone to using insulting, coarse or derogatory language
Invictus
No matter the nature of your afflictions, Henley's poem 'Invictus' will cover you in a shroud of invincibility and infuse you with an unconquerable spirit...