DALLAS, TX – Night calls can be a scary thing for new interns. Everything from blood pressures of 170/80 and sleeping pill requests in demented patients, to requests to remove contact precautions and all sorts of things that may be better handled during the day, can flash across an intern’s pager. This night was different, however. Spencer Longmore, PGY-5 months, got the page that summons immediate fear: “Rm. 201, fever and cough, urgent!!”
“I got a few butterflies at this point, because the patient was almost certainly going to have pneumonia,” recounts Longmore. “When nursing report and my physical exam demonstrated as much… I knew then what I had to do.”
It was at that moment an order went out for Rocephin and azithromycin.
Program directors have hailed the move as brilliant and are currently running multiple neuropsychiatric tests on Longmore to determine what caused this turn of events. Gomerblog will continue to follow for updates; however, it is believed that directors will release findings in next month’s New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
