
These are my healthy lungs and pretty-looking heart. Hope they stay that way for a long time. Had a very denerving experience today at the antenatal clinic. An 18-year-old girl apparently had a miscarriage and was bleeding for 2 days but her vital signs were stable. I scanned her with the clinic very fuzzy ultrasound machine and found what I thought was her uterus which appeared to still contain some POC (product of conception), and concluded that she had an incomplete miscarriage with active bleeding. At that time it was already lunch break (but I was working through 8am-2pm non-stop), so the clinic operator was out, so I couldn't call the Gynae MO in the referral hospital, so I ordered for the patient to be sent anyways urgently. 2 hours later, the oncall Gynae MO called me in the clinic and asked me why I did not inform her of the patient because the patient actually had an ectopic pregnancy, and was being prep for a laparatomy as we were speaking! But she was very understanding of my situation when I explained what had happened. She was nice enough to explain that the bulky structure that I saw was blood collection in the Pouch of Douglas (the pocket between the bladder and the rectum)! Honestly I've never seen such a huge POD collection. But the patient was ok. But I felt so momentarily shaken because in ectopic pregnancy, the patient could have just collapsed and die. But after several seconds, I had to pushed that out of mind because I still had a dozen more patients with problems for me to solve.
1 comment:
Priceless experience is what you get out of thing like this. There will be many more such things heading your way but you will be also growing very experienced and wise. Great post!
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