Passing and Passing Out
The Test-To-End-All-Tests was okay–I passed. So that’s good news.
In less-good news, I had vaso-vagal reaction yesterday while seeing a patient with our preceptor yesterday. (Another classmate had one as well.) A vaso-vagal reaction is basically a drop in blood pressure in response to emotional stimuli–usually visual or olfactory, according to my preceptor.
It was the weirdest thing. We were seeing a patient with a large surgical wound on the side of his neck; it was a long incision, and had two drainage tubes coming out of it as well. We were in the patient’s room for no more than 8 minutes, but out of nowhere, in the last minute we were there, I started to feel intensely nauseous. My first thought was that some noxious gas was being bumped into the room. Another classmate had already stepped back and sat down because she was feeling a little light-headed. We left the room and I continued to feel really naseous, like I was gonna barf everywhere. Then a couple minutes later I felt a little light-headed, so I sat down in the middle of the hallway. Lost all my color. After a few minutes rest, we walked down to the cafeteria and our preceptor (Dr. Gesundheit, is that not the coolest name ever) bought us cookies and fruit.
Came back home and took a nice nap and felt better after that. It was an especially strange experience because I’d thought I’d already seen far worse–open heart surgery, heart transplants… but for some reason this did it for me.
The very first (and only) time I ever fainted, I was standing at a patient’s bedside looking at an enormous abdominal incision, complete with retention sutures. I had never seen such a thing before.
Were your knees locked in awe? That’s what caused my fall…. :-)
Keep your legs moving!
Dr. Gesundheit is probably a better name than Dr. Brilliant…but it’s probably worth a debate.
I’m prone to the vaso-vagal myself.
-Jeremy (another med student with a penchant for blogging)
Been there, done that (twice). Hit the floor during the placement of an epidural during first year (last words heard: “then you’ll feel a pop as you go through the ligament….”). And then, more embarrassingly during 3rd year, nearly passed out while watching the surgical team do a bed-side debridement of a diabetic patient who stepped on a nail. The worst part was how they didn’t even have to numb the guy up before they dug out his plantar fascia down through his adductor hallucis … *that’s* how bad is peripheral neuropathy was.
The new site looks great!
The spelling police have caught you – its nauseas. ;-) ha ha ha
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=nauseas&x=11&y=14
Love your site.
I’ve usually got an exceptionally strong stomach, but the one time I experienced that fainting sensation was when I had to take my young son in to get a head cut stitched up. It wasn’t so much the blood and the gash and the needle as it was the sudden realization that it was my kid sitting there with his scalp laid open.
He was extremely calm and in control, while his dad got all wobbly.