Word: coding
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Code" is medical resident lingo for emergency resuscitation team response. Different hospitals use different names; some use numbers, some colors, but they are all ways of instantly telling the people who work there, without scaring patients and visitors, that there's an emergency. Code red is typically a fire in the hospital; code blue is cardiac arrest. I was three weeks out of medical school, a brand new surgical intern (that is, a first-year resident) at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, when my days and nights began to be punctuated by the heady rush of codes...
...page operator's voice, clearer than usual, would repeat "code blue, Six West" through the enormous hospital complex. The code team residents would drop everything - being in the middle of an operation the single exception - and run at full speed to the floor location. Chief residents had keys that could instantly hijack big elevators jammed full of people; younger residents galloped up or down the stairs...
...intern you want experience and responsibility - you are trying to become a surgeon, so you want to do what's hard. At the code you hope to intubate, or to put in the huge IVs we use in the big veins of the neck or chest. If the chief wasn't there yet we were the ones who had to start giving directions to the nurses and medical people who filled the room. A smart intern in this situation always watched the face of the oldest nurse and changed course when it told...
...rule at the Brigham was that we, the Surgical team, ran the code. Medical teams' advice was suspect - they never gave enough fluid or bicarbonate, didn't use big enough IV's or strong enough electrical shocks. They were not "procedurally oriented"; no "hands." "Doctors who can't operate" was the typically arrogant Brigham surgeons' term for the medical residents...
...program; pumping up the egos was a way to get us to work incredibly hard. In the midst of it we felt openly superior to nearly everyone, especially the medical people, whose carefully formed opinions on subtler issues were, admittedly, not always very helpful in the emergency of a code...