A patient boarding in the emergency department begins decompensating after a profound fit of retching and vomiting. Blood pressure is dropping and o2 sats are falling...you eyeball the patient from the door and he looks severely ill. No time to page the floor team...time to dive in and resuscitate!
A 68 yo male arrives after a motor vehicle collision in which he was the restrained driver of a T-boned car. His only complaint is left hip pain. No problem right? Wrong.
A 44 yo male who works as a construction worker presents with 2 days of lower back pain. Having seen literally hundreds of cases of benign musculoskeletal pain in the last year, you are pretty sure you can handle one more. But is there danger lurking behind this well appearing patient with normal vitals? Well, yes of course. Otherwise we wouldn't be covering it on EM Daily....
A 44 yo male presents complaining of abdominal pain. As your basic differential for abdominal pain swirls through your head, you are a bit surprised to walk in the room and see the patient sitting upright, vomiting bright red blood all over himself. Time to shift gears doc.....
It's an ice storm in South Jersey! Thirty-four (34!) patients present within 4 hours with slip and falls and a veritable menagerie of orthopedic injuries. You see a 29 yo male who everted his ankle on the sidewalk. There is an obvious deformity. Should we order an xray and then call the orthopedics resident? No! We're going to reduce, splint, and discharge this patient ourselves....
An elderly female arrives complaining of fatigue and weakness (easy right?) and a casual glance at the MAR shows the she is on digoxin for CHF. You notice she has a HR in the 50s and wonder if digoxin toxicity could be repsonsible for her symptoms. Lucky for you, you brushed up on this basics with this quick case review!
A 2 yo female presentes with parents with complaints of "whole body swelling" noted over days. You panic slightly as you reach for possible differentia diagnoses to explain this perplexing symptom and are struck by a distant memory of your peds rotation from medical school, or perhaps a flash of a memory staring at your Robbins textbook of pathophysiology.....
A 57 year old female presents with bilateral lower extremity erythema, pain, and swelling. Bilateral cellulitis you say? (Somewhere a dematologist just screamed into a pillow) Surely not! But what else could this be? Read on to expand your differential for bilateral red legs!
A healthy 30 yo male p/w cc of generalized weakness and pain for several hours. But generalized weakness and pain can be about 2 million things! you bemoan internally as you sign up for the patient. Hang on, what's this? Admitted previously for severe, unexplained hypokalemia? The plot has thickened....
EMS calls ahead to report a 73 yo female with active CPR in progress after being pulled from a housefire. As you run to prepare you resus room, you wrack your brain for everything you know about smoke inhalation victims. Aren't there some toxicology concerns here? Good thing you read this quick refresher on EMDaily!
