Audrey Shafer is an anesthesiologist.
He was sick-sick but he had broken his hip, and if you put a broken bone and an orthopedist together, you have an operation. It wasn’t as far afield as the classic ortho-anesthesia video where ortho calls for an OR for a dead patient, but believe me, all kinds of badness can occur that turns sick to dead.
A good sign was that the patient was ornery. He didn’t so much …
I am a Philadelphian. I was born in a hospital within a few blocks of Independence Hall, where the Constitution was written, and of Thomas Jefferson’s lodging, where the Declaration of Independence was drafted. Whether it was elementary school trips to Betsy Ross House, Ben Franklin’s Printing House or, yes, to see the crack in the Liberty Bell, then housed in the Hall itself, the tenets of our country’s revolutionary …
I can’t breathe. These words cut to the core of all humans, and shock anesthesiologists. We are trained to continuously listen to and think about breathing. We coach our patients: Take a deep breath! Yes! And another one! We watch our patients’ chests rise and fall, like waves on an endless sea. We listen to bellows and the winds of breath through tubes and …
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