Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Trauma in guatemala?

We were interrupted during our guatemalan equivalent of ¨morning report¨ after a nurse informed us that there was a patient who suffered a severe burn walked in the door. Apparantely he had been working on some electrical wiring and had gotten shocked, entrance wound in the hands, exit wound on the soles of the feet. His scars looked like a nightmare however his demeanor was modest. At once we rushed down and memories of 3rd year surgery core small group passed my mind as in an instant i realized I would need to use the parkland formula to figure out how many liters of fluid he would need. We cleaned him up pretty darn good and after some silvadene and wet to dry dressing, we did all we possibly could as he definately would need some sort of burn speciality center. His muscles were tightening up and although I could not understand his language I knew from his gestures and his eyes that he was in pain and this his muscles were all cramping up. Burn patients esp electrical burn patients are at high risk for developing compartment syndrome. While fluids were up and about flowing in his veins, I tried as hard as i could to move his lower limbs from flexion into extension. Alas, we were able to get a makeshift ambulance over for the 3 hour transport to guatemala city. Alert and oriented, oxygen saturation in the 90´s and adequate urine output with no evidence of rhabomyolysis well at least not yet, we shipped him out. Hopefully he´ll survive it´s not a good prognosis.

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