ICU incident #2

I had another run-in with the ICU doctor today. My team went to the ICU to see our patient with PCP pneumonia and the pneumothorax. He had ended up getting a chest tube that night I had the first confrontation with the ICU doctor. We were in there seeing the patient when the ICU doctor came in. He asked me what I thought was wrong with our patient – I said the oxygen saturation was 86% (for normal people the oxygen saturation in the blood should be 100%), which is super super low, and pretty worrisome. He asked if that was okay, I said I didn’t think so, that I would prefer that it be above 90%. He asked if I knew why the patient had such a low sat, and I said because for some reason, he was unhooked from the ventilator. He said I was wrong, and in this case it was okay for the saturation to be this low. Then he asked Boipelo the same questions, and she answered the same way, and he just turns to both of us and says, you are both wrong and YOU KNOW WHY! And he stalks out of the room. We were like, okayyyyy. And we look at Dr. Stefanski, and asked him if he knew why, and he says no. That ICU doctor is such an idiot. So we write our note, and then we leave the room and run into the ICU doctor again, and Dr. Stefanski says to him “so I think you were trying to make a really good teaching point back there – could you tell us what the reason was?” And I pipe up and ask if it was because the patient looked clinically well despite having a very low oxygen saturation, and he just interrupts me and says “YOU INSULT ME LITTLE GIRL” and he stalks into his office. I was absolutely dumbfounded, as was the rest of my team! Boipelo starts laughing and Dr. Stefanski just says don’t worry about it. What an ass.

I was on call today too. It was finally pretty busy – I admitted 3 patients, and there were two more to admit when I left. That’s when Boipelo came back (she leaves from 4-9pm, but has to stay overnight) and she saw the two patients sitting there. I felt pretty bad, but I was pretty busy with other admissions and also from getting calls about random patients needing IV’s or falling out of bed, or getting nose bleeds. Things like that. She kinda gave me a hard time about leaving her all that work, but I think she was joking. Plus when we take call, we’re sort of “extra” help anyways – if we weren’t there they’d have to take all the patients themselves, so I don’t feel too bad. I had to get home, I was so tired, and I was still sick and coughing up a lung.

When we got home, it was really nice though – Kristy and Kiona had made dinner for us! They made us eggplant parmigiana and salad! They complained that it tasted like barbecue sauce, because the pasta sauce here is different from in the states, but I still really liked it. I had two servings! I was pretty excited, because the next day, we were going to go to Tau!