The word “dialysis” evokes many clinical indications and contexts. In chronic end-stage renal disease (ESRD), patients typically have some form of long-term access like an AV fistula for their scheduled sessions. In the short term, we’re taught indications for dialysis based on the vowels:
Yesterday marked an important day in my professional career. I passed my ABA applied exam! I am now officially board certified and recognized as a diplomate of the American Board of Anesthesiology (D.ABA).
I wanted to catalog some of the places I’ve visited in Boston over my fellowship training using Google Maps. This will be updated periodically with new venues!
There are several options to get into a critical care fellowship. Our hospital has programs for those who completed residencies in anesthesiology, surgery, internal medicine (IM), or emergency medicine (EM).
2017 was another great year in my training. I moved to a new city for the first time, completed 50% of my critical care fellowship, turned 30 years old, and am still going strong! It was also the first year where I regularly started writing lessons, doing Instagram Live teaching…
This post outlines the steps in traditional, central cannulation for cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). Depending on the nature of the surgery and the patient’s comorbidities, other sites are often cannulated (left heart bypass, femoral-femoral peripheral cannulation, etc.)
Here’s a quick primer of cardiac transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) including actual images I’ve taken as a critical care fellow with corresponding labeled diagrams. I challenge you all to actually review your patients’ echo images instead of reading the final impression. You don’t need to know the nitpicky numbers, gradient assessments,…
Normal cardiac conduction propagates downward and leftward from the SA node to the His-Purkinje system. Thus, lead I (points to the patient’s left) and lead aVF (points straight down) represent the component vectors in the x and y planes, respectively, for the cardiac conduction axis. This means that downward is + for lead aVF, and…
Reading a chest x-ray (CXR) is an incredibly important aspect of acute care medicine and a skill that all healthcare providers should at least have some comfort in doing. The key for interpreting any radiographic image is having a methodical approach you follow every single time, no matter how simple or complex…
During normal respirations, the parietal pleura slides over the visceral pleura. This movement can be visualized with ultrasound. The lack of sliding can be a concerning sign for pneumothorax, although data suggest that such a finding may have a poor positive predictive value in the critically ill population. So how do we…