Breathing through a straw

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Today when we went to visit the baby in the ICU who we had done CPR on at the beginning of the month because we heard that they were going to take his breathing tube out. However, what we found was that they had disconnected him from the ventilator but had left his breathing tube in!! For those of you who are nonmedical, this is basically like forcing someone to breathe through a straw and it also increase their risk of infection. We went to find the medical officer taking care of the baby and she told us that the ICU medical officer wouldn't let her take the tube out of the baby and told her that they always leave the tubes in patients off the ventilator. Unfortunately we needed the ICU MO's permission to extubate and he wasn't here yet so we weren't able to take his tube out but they finally did later in the afternoon.

We gave out some coloring books this afternoon and the kids were so cute! A couple of them grabbed us after we left and made us come back so they could show us their creations.

In clinic today, Katie saw a 7 year old with severe scoliosis and atrophy of the left side with headaches. She had already had a head CT since apparently none of the other doctors she had seen did a physical exam to correlate the scoliosis with her headaches. She is proud to say that she taught the patient's mother some soft tissue OMM techniques to help with the headaches and neck pain. She also sent her for X rays and referred her to orthopedics. I admitted a kid with recurrent neck abscess (i love neck masses!) and there was another baby referred to our clinic due to "skin infection" who had miliaria crystallina (a benign rash caused by sweat accumulating in bubbles under the skin)

Towards the end of clinic a Mom carried her 10 year old son in that had been sent over from casualty (ED). He had an acute presentation of skin itching, vomiting, red eyes and swelling of the face. Now I'm sure even those of you who haven't trained in medicine can recognize this as an allergic reaction. Somehow the doctors in the ED had decided that this kid probably had measles and wanted our opinion about it. He did much better after some antihistamines and fluids. I also admitted a really smiley adorable boy named Darius with chronic cough. He was only 10 months old but walked right in by himself! We went to check on him the next day and he walked around the ward with us for 15 minutes.

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