A Tear-Jerking Moment
I try to use as little jargon as possible, but sometimes it’s hard to explain a story and its significance without them.
Those words have a hyperlink to another page where I explain the terminology and concepts behind them.
Even if you don’t get a kick out of this story, I hope you at least learned something new!
This is a story about a girl in her 20s.
Her only history was a serious bout of pneumonia which led her to be put on life-saving ECMO. It is rare for anyone this young to be sick from typical pneumonia. So my preceptor and I were guessing that she might have had Covid-19. Yet, nowhere was it stated in her charts that she tested positive.
According to my brief chart review, her chest X-ray was as bad as it sounds. Her lung fields were heavily opaque, indicating extensive tissue damage. Her radiologic report stated that she has a moderate pleural effusion on her left. Her critical care team has put her on the waiting list for a lung transplant, which my preceptor told me could take months to even hear of a possible donor.
I went into her room with my preceptor to assess her as part of my first rounds. She was awake and alert. I introduced myself as a respiratory therapy student and that we were going to check up on her ventilator.