The 2 year birthday of the newsletter kind of crept up on me really! Apart from a few weeks break in the last 2 years, this has been the one habit that’s been a blessing of the pandemic. From this, the habit of the podcast, starting the Medium blog and the beginnings of more regular Youtube content are starting to bear fruit. Thank you SO much for following along for the ride! It’s very much appreciated!
I’ll have to do something to celebrate. Do you have any suggestions?
This week’s newsletter was delayed due to quite a hectic on call. While most are busy, this one had my pulse racing. The last 2 cases were particularly hectic: one was an elderly person who had severe breathing problems but was also bleeding from the gut. We needed to do a endoscopic procedure to look at the stomach and stop any bleeding there but I was worried that if I put a breathing tube in, we wouldn’t be able to take it out again for ages, which wouldn’t help their pneumonia. What followed was a super tense balancing act of getting them sleepy, but not too sleepy.
Near the end of the procedure, the next patient arrived who had both the surgeons and myself on edge. This person had a few days of a sore throat by then started to develop noisy breathing. a CT scan basically showed that the area around the throat was only about 6mm wide at one point! Normally it’s at least double that! Now one of the smallest breathing tubes I can put in has an outer diameter of 8.5mm so we had to use steriods and get the patient to breathe in adrenaline to reduce the swelling and put in a breathing tube using a technique called Awake fibre-optic intubation. That’s right. They were awake! (FYI – my technique is a bit different than the one in the video, but same general idea)
On the non-work front, I have been trying to keep more of my days empty, like today. It’s been a foreign experience to have a whole weekday off to myself! I managed to get so many little things that had been piling up done! I even managed to be social this weekend…
It was one of my friend’s 40th birthday this weekend and I was asked to attend. Being a hermit I usually make an appearance and disappear but this time, I was tasked with doing the photography for part of the event! That’s one way of keeping me there I suppose!
Overall, it was nice to actually be in an event with a lot of people. I feel like I really haven’t been in a large crowd in years even though the fear of catching the virus again lingers. So far, so good: no symptoms!