My Macgyver Moment

Since emergency physicians are the MacGyvers of medicine – mullet not included – we asked our readers to send in their best stories of improvising on the fly. What did you do when you were fighting against the clock and couldn’t find the supplies you needed? Here are our four winning entries, with comments by Ken Iserson, MD, author of Improvised Medicine. Published entrants gain free admittance to Blood and Sand, a tropical CME in Atlantis, Bahamas. For a chance to win, send your best MacGyver Moment to lplaster@epmonthly.com Give Me a Hand(stand) by Andrew Langsam I was getting ready to go on a long-awaited dive trip to the great barrier reef. The week before the trip, I was flossing and popped out an amalgam which hit the roof of my mouth and then disappeared. Being an ER doc, I immediately suspected that it had wound up in my lung. I went to my ED radiologist and asked him to take a single view AP X-ray to confirm my suspicions. He assured me that I would be coughing if I had inhaled such an object, but he humored me and had his tech take the film anyway. Sure enough, there was a small, dense radiopaque foreign body in my left lower lung field on X-ray. I called my friendly pulmonologist and set up my bronchoscopy, bummed by the thought that having him mess with my lung might cause me to reconsider diving the next week in Australia. On day two, after the untimely aspiration, and the day before the scheduled bronchoscopy I had my MacGyver moment. I thought to m...
Source: EPMonthly.com - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news