I feel pretty rubbish at the moment and I don't look so good either, I've taken on my deathly pale shade as opposed to merely unhealthily pale! I think I'm jsut overly tired so I shall be off to bed shortly, but first I thought I'd write about an interesting one we had today.
A 6 year old boy playing with his cousin accidentally was stabbed in the eye with a bic biro. He came to A&E and you could just see there was something really not right about this child's eye - it looked pierced/broken, it's quite difficult to describe but it was not a smooth surface. Turns out the pen has pierced his cornea, he's lost most of the sight in that eye and is going to theatre tonight to try and save his eye and restore some of the vision. But this kid was just amazing. He was so calm and quiet, probably alittle bit in shock to be honest, but even as time went by he was still so calm. If only all our children were like that!
The only other thing I wanted to blog about today was the insitence some people have on X-Rays, people really do like them. We had one parent today he kept insisting on getting a second x-ray for his son. He has ben x-rayed a week ago for a foot injury, there were no broken bones so it was diagnosed as a ligament injury which can be quite painful. They were reviewed this week and he keps asking for an X-Ray to be done, we explained we'd already done one and there were no breaks and then he'd ask for another one! So the consultant patiently explained (for about the 5th time) that there would be no change, there were no broken bones and the treatment was just to get one with it and get mobilising (and stop being such a wuss he said to me later!).
I have been in countless situations before where poeple are asking for X-Rays for things that don't need to be X-Rayed and where the management of them won't change regardless of an X-Ray result.
My oven is beeping, but I shall write another post sometime about the belief that medicine should be able to do soemthing about everything and that we should have a pill to fix anything.
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2 comments:
To be fair Mr Man has had broken bones that have been missed the first time they were x-rayed. But I agree, if the treatment will be the same what difference does it make? This was the case with my coccyx. I fell on it - twice! I could feel something moving and was sure it must be broken or something but the doctor said they couldn't put it in plaster so an x-ray was pointless. Fair point.
Eurgh, that must have felt quite unpleasant!
I know that we do sometimes miss broken bones, and there are some injuries that we x-ray again a week later because they do not always show on the first occassion. When we have our trauma clinic the x-rays are also reviewed then to be sure the first person didn't miss anything or the radiologist reporting them.
The conern in children is that we are exposing growing bones to radiaton. That said I have heard both sides of the arguemnt: We don't x-ray unnecessarily because it's a dose of radiation to growing bones, and a radiologist reassuring parents that the chest x-ray their son was having was fine - 30 less times the radiation he would get when they take him on a plane to India.
This family were Bengali, not Indian (we actually have very few Indian families in the area) and I *cringed* thinking it rather ignorant of the radiologist (who was clearly in a hurry with better things to do!)
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