The Death That Brought Big-Shot Doctors to Life

The old lady's heart and lungs were giving out. Doctors rushed into her room. Lots of doctors and important ones too:

As someone shouted the details of her condition over the din, I
noticed that there were a lot of attending doctors in the room:
although codes are usually run by residents, there were at least threeattendings at this one.

We administered the usual set of indignities. I did chestcompressions, and for the first time, felt bones cracking andseparating under my hands. (They tell us that means you're doing itright.) A friend of mine held the paddles that administered the shocks.
There were bicarb, calcium, and epinephrine pushes through an IV. Thewhole time, the attendings watched calmly from a corner of the room. Itwas oddly quiet, for what it was.

At fifteen minutes, I opened her eyes with my fingertips and shone alight into her pupils. They didn't move. I shook my head at theresident at the foot of the bed. "Fixed pupils," she said. "It's beenfifteen minutes. I'm going to call this code."

Check the rest of this post on a blog called Signout to learn why.

In case you're curious, "s__ignout__ is hospital slang for the transfer of information between patient care teams."

And to judge by this well-written post, it may be the name of a book the anonymous author -- a resident -- writes in the future.

For what it was [Signout]