RickInOz

It’s the end of another week at work. Each day I come home and Regan asks how my day was. Most of the time I say nothing special happened, partly because I am tired and my brain is rapidly fading, but mostly because after a while you become blasé to critical illness.

For no particular reason I just reflected on some of the cases and problems we’ve had on our unit in the past week. Our cases have included three quadraplegic patients (one injured doing gymnastics, one in a car crash and the last due to spinal cancer many years ago), a patient whose cerebral arterio-venous malformation caused a bleed into his brain, a post-operative gastrectomy due to deliberate battery acid ingestion, and an unfortunate man who was electrocuted by high voltage power cables. These are just the tip of the iceberg as we have a steady stream of patients with sepsis, respiratory failure, trauma and substance abuse.

Each patient presents their own challenges and must be managed in a subtly different way. Having specialised in critical care medicine for the past year and a half I don’t see any reason to return to anaesthesia. That speciality has its appeal, but after a while I found myself growing bored. There are only so many ways you can put somebody to sleep, and you only see a snapshot of each case while they are in theatre. ICU provides the opportunity to snatch these patients from imminent demise and not let go of them until they are well enough to fend for themselves.

The next time I say “Nothing special happened today”, perhaps I should consider that what is rather routine and ordinary to us may, in fact, be worth more comment and consideration. So as you can imagine, after a busy week like that I’m looking forward to a duvet day tomorrow. Night all!