My fellow student physician was working a typical 12-hour shift when a panicked father ran into the pediatric clinic holding his son, who was limp and almost gray.
His pulse was frighteningly slow and he wasn’t breathing.
The father was Middle Eastern and couldn’t tell my fellow doctor-in-training what was wrong. There was no translator. The 5-year-old boy had no obvious injuries.
After a few moments, the boy’s pulse stopped.
The young resident started CPR immediately and ordered the nurses to get an IV and an adrenaline shot from the crash cart.
They just stared back blankly. They had no idea what was needed or where to find it.
There was supposed to be a supervising doctor overseeing everything — but he wasn’t around.
The nurses finally brought the cart, and the student doctor frantically searched for the adrenaline while the child lay clinically dead for several minutes. The attending doctor finally showed up, but just stood there offering no advice.
My colleague found the epinephrine (adrenaline) and shot it into the IV, which the student doctor had to insert alone. The heartbeat started up again.
The child was rushed to the ER and then transferred to an ICU at another hospital. We never found out what happened to the little boy. But because of the loss of oxygen to his brain, the odds are he’s severely brain-damaged.
