An 89 year old little old lady is brought in because she is weak and doesn’t want to eat. She hasn’t eaten in about a week and she hasn’t been out of her home in longer than that. Finally a friend visiting her convinces her to come to the hospital for some IV fluids.

When she arrives, her tongue is dry, she’s tachycardic, and she has no urine output. We begin fluids and obtain labs that show she is moderately dehydrated. Otherwise, the labs and EKG look surprisingly good.

We make arrangements to admit her to the on-call physician since she has no primary care physician. We’re holding patients in the emergency department because the floor is full. The on-call physician has several patients being held in the ED. The patient gets taken over to x-ray department for a chest x-ray. She returns and about a half hour later I get a phone call from the radiologist.

“Your little lady with the shortness of breath has bilateral pulmonary emboli on her chest CT.”
“What little old lady with shortness of breath?”
“Mrs. Doroshow in Bed 4.”
“She’s not short of breath and I didn’t order a chest CT on her.”
[10 seconds of silence]
“Ooops. We did the scan on the wrong person. Well, she still has bilateral pulmonary emboli.”
“Nurse, can we get a heparin drip going on Mrs. Doroshow and hook her up to a monitor?”
“Whaaaat? Why?”
“You’re not going to believe this.”

There but for the grace of God go I.

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This and all posts about patients may be my experiences or may be submitted by readers for publication here. If you would like to have a patient story published on WhiteCoat’s Call Room, please e-mail me.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 25th, 2011 at 8:55 am and is filed under Patient Encounters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.