Typical Friday - Atypical Lunch

Today was a rainy, dreary day. I spent the morning in the ICU, in which every patients was deteriorating. My Stevens-Johnson patient was tachycardic, had a temp of 102, and had a WBC count of 15,000. Chances are she is becoming septic - not a good thing. My Clostridium difficile patients was taken back to the OR last night for removal of all of his colon except for about 6 inches of sigmoid colon and his rectum. He is now so swollen that his abdomen couldn't be sewn shut. He looks very grave indeed. Did I mention that his WBC count was 69,500 today? Then there was the 92 year old man with blood in his urine. The catheter bag was red, not yellow. And then there was the 62 year old man with 5 second pauses between his heart beats. A heart rate of 30 is never good, and when it takes 5 seconds for your heart to beat again...things are set up for disaster. My liver failure patient passed away this morning. So, it was a very busy and interesting morning.

I decided to take lunch at 12:15. When I stepped off the elevator, I literally ran into my liver failure patient's body. He was so jaundiced that I could see the yellow outline of his body under the sheet. I followed it down the hall and around the corner to the pharmacy. I was beginning to wonder where they were taking his body. As I scanned my badge to enter the pharmacy, I saw them load the body into a service elevator. The pharmacy staff informed me that the morgue is on the second floor. Needless to say, lunch wasn't very appetizing. It wasn't that I had seen the body, but rather the realization that the guy died. I knew he was going to die, but I guess it didn't really "set-in" until I saw his body. It was a great lunch.

This of course is not the first time that I've encountered a dead body in a hospital. During the first day of my first clinical rotation as a pharmacy student, I ran into a dead body on my way to lunch. Of course at that hospital, the morgue was directly across from the cafeteria. Earlier in my residency, I encountered the funeral home wheeling a body out of the hospital. Apparently I'm a bit of magnet for dead bodies. Great...