Trauma Weekend This weekend was the last one with a student for awhile. His class graduates in a few weeks and he was working with me to get experience doing trauma cases. As I told my student the night shift is "feast or famine" for getting cases. Some weekends are busy and others are not. This turned out to be a busy weekend for trauma. Over the weekend we did five trauma cases. They included a man with a gunshot wound to the abdomen and another with a gunshot wound to the chest. We also did three cases involving people with stab wounds. My student did very well with all the cases. That was my weekend.

Last Student This weekend and next I will have an Air Force Anesthesia student working with me. He is the last one for this year as his class all graduate in November. He has over 800 cases under his belt and has done all kinds of cases. He has not done very many trauma cases which is why he is spending time with me. Last night we did two cases. The first involved a 20 something year old man with a stab wound to the lower abdomen. It turned out that his injuries were minor with no internal damage. The second case of the night was a little more serious. A 20 something year old man came in with multiple gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen. His right lung was severely damaged and there was damage to his small intestine. He lost a lot of blood. We gave him 26 units of blood products to replace what he lost. At the end of the case we left the breathing tube in place and took him to the ICU. My student came looking for trauma cases and he got them. We will see what happens tonight.

Routine Weekend ... So Far Last night was my second of four nights at work. So far it has been a fairly routine weekend. I did two cases on Thursday night. The first involved a 56 year old man with a small bowel obstruction. The man was from the Philippines and did not speak English but fortunately his daughter was there to translate. His case only took about an hour with no problems. The second case was on a healthy 23 year old man who had his appendix removed. I only did one case last night. It involved a 14 year old boy with a VP shunt. A VP shunt is a device that is surgically placed in a patients brain. It is used in patients whose brains produce to much cerebral spinal fluid. The shunt is a tube that travels under the skin and deposits the excess spinal fluid into the abdominal cavity where it is reabsorbed by the body. In this case the boys body was not reabsorbing the spinal fluid fast enough. His abdomen was filled and distended with the excess fluid. The surgeons made a small incision on the side of his abdomen to bring the tip of the VP shunt tube out where it was attached to a drainage bag. Excess fluid was also removed from his abdominal cavity. That has been it so far but I have two more nights to go.