Feb 10
20
I was at clinicals on the med-surg floor a couple of weeks ago. Clinicals (almost) always start the same way: with our clinicals group stepping out of the elevator and walking up to a clearly-distracted nurse. She, in turn, will shuffle papers and look busy for as long as she can, riding the very last possible microsecond before civility forces her look up. We will cheerily introduce ourselves and offer to help in any way we can, and the nurse will come to grips with the fact that the four little ice-cream suited ducklings standing hopefully in front of her desk really aren’t going to go away. With a sigh, she will begin to deal with us. We each choose a patient that will be “outside of our comfort zone,” pull the chart off the chart rack, and disappear into the nurses’ break room to pore over the paper trail in an effort to get a handle on just what the hell we’re going to be dealing with.
I was working with Hot Girl and The Captain, and we each had really cool patients. My patient was admitted straight from the ER, for some pretty interesting things, and I was enjoying the chart. I am embarrassingly green about figuring out actual hospital charts, but I was kind of getting the hang of it. I still think it’s pretty exciting to fingerwalk through layers of orders and test results, reading the story of how things have unfolded for each patient. The others were looking at their charts, too, and we were talking about lab values and looking things up and asking for clarification and starting to get into it.
My patient’s situation on admission had been so critical that the ER doc had given a STAT order for some badass therapy I didn’t even recognize. “Cardioxeric refibrillation,” perhaps, or some kind of drug I hadn’t heard of… Chlorxano rhodifil, or something. Whatever it was, it had to be something cool.
“Hey, y’all, what does “CXR” stand for?”
There followed one of those horrible moments where your limbic system knows that you just royally screwed up, but the more elegant and dainty bits of your consciousness haven’t quite figured out exactly what you did. Two million years ago, I would have been tiger bait.
The Captain just looked at me over the tops of his glasses, completely motionless, completely expressionless. He didn’t blink. He just looked. Hot Girl did the same, but of course, THAT didn’t last.
“Rob… really? CXR? Really?”
I knew I knew it, but it just wasn’t there. Huge yellow tiger eyes peered at me from between the leaves.
“Uhhh…”
The Captain blinked. Once.
“Dude. ‘Chest X-Ray’.”
“Oh. I knew that.”
At least the tiger would have killed me quick.
