The Untouchables

What can I say .. I had a wonderful call yesterday ! One of those zombie 24 hour call but honestly I had fun with the guys ! It was Hady and Adam doing the OT call with Aktar as our SMO. I was the "Crash" person ; and being an all boys group ( few parties were jealous of us... !! ) we had Vas doing his virgin Lecturer call. And how "sumbang mahram" it was !!!
I had to do Cerebral Aneurysm Coiling in the radiology deparment to do in the morning. We had our interventionalist who came back from training in Turkey to do it and I must say , me and Dr Ling were impressed with his plan and work. It is always nice working in an environment when 2 working parties communicate well.
For my crash call last night , my pager was behaving well because I was hardly paiged overnight. I " converted" my call to OT because of the 2 interesting cases that cam up after 7pm. The first was a fairly middle aged mum who had massive pulmonary embolism ( blockage in the pulmonary circulation ) and she was due for surgical embolectomy( removing the blockage out literally ! ) .It was a high risk case with chances of mortality > 70% while doing the procedure. I always find by pass amazing and it was still amazing yesterday seeing the perfusionist manipulating the normal body.
We finished at 4am.. and thought that a good night chocolate milk in Delifrance was the last toast for the night..

picture taken after the embolectomy..
And boy were we wrong !! immediately , there was a trauma involving a young foreigner where it was suspected that her pulmonary ( lung ) vessels were ruptured ! She bled > 3 liters from her chest tube before coming to us in OT.
The four of us was there and I can tell you , we were SO tired by then. Hady could not open his eyes and Adam shook his head in disbelief when he was informed of another craniectomy that was to be done at the same time ! but because we had an impending death upon us ; the adrenaline certainly brought us to another level. It was difficult inserting arterial line and central venous line for this lady as she was bleeding away and in hypovolaemic shock. We pumped in blood like nobody's business wooo !! And because it is a requirement for the patient to be on double lumen tube we tried all our might and Aktar is a really supercool anaesthetist ! Tabik spring bro !! He managed to insert it well and although we did not properly confirm the placement after the right lateral positioning ( with me holding it in position tight after that lah.. hahaha ) ..but when it was time , the lung which was required to be collapsed was collapsable ! She became haemodynamically stable after the surgeon found what was causing the massive haemorrhage. And we felt good...
The case was taken over the the next day's oncall team at 830 am.. but we were still in our elements but the fatigue came but honestly , I felt the satisfaction eventhough it was one of the most ridiculous call I've ever had !!
We felt like... we were the Untouchables !!

camwhoring outside the cardiac theatre..
p/s the dates on the pic.. bukti tu !!