14th August 1996
I was a student at Georges' in London and I'd been working on wards in pre-registration clinical medicine for about eight months.

In an average week on an average ICU the team on the ward would perhaps lose 5% of patients; e.g., for every twenty patients, nineteen would leave ICU and one would leave either to a hospice or to the mortuary.

On this particular day, we started the day with nine patients in the ICU. We were adding another two (both children, one aged eight, the other aged ten) when I arrived.

By the end of the day, they were all dead.

Nothing to do with me and my actions - I hadn't done anything specifically wrong or incorrect, it was simply a position of having a mass of things all going wrong at the same time; the "perfect storm" of disease, stroke, MI, TIA - all coming within minutes of each other.

Now when I sit in my office here and I worry about how rubbish my day is I always allow my imagination to flit back to that day and suddenly ... it's not so bad after all.
(Medical_Male Say aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, Tue 12 Jan 2010, 19:02, 1 reply, 16 years ago)

fair play
that's one bad day
( Citizen Cavy Admires your passion for conformity, Tue 12 Jan 2010, 19:06, Reply)