So You Dropped Your Pager into the Toilet, What to Do Next
You're on-call, but before sh*t hits the fan, you hit the toilet. Just when you're pulling up your pants or fixing your belt, you...
Tips: How to Defuse the Angry Patient (or at the Very Least, Make Things...
Handling the angry patient (or family member) is a very delicate situation, so we should all be grateful that we were never educated on...
Get Your Questions Ready, It’s Time to Ask Gomerfrog!
Meet Gomerfrog, our new Gomerblog frog! Gomerdog was getting lonely and asked that we even up the ratio of animals to humans. The rest...
ICD-10 Primer, Lesson 2: Roller-Skate Documentation
A minute doesn’t go by at work without someone talking about yet another patient involved in some roller-skating injury. ICD-9 codes for roller-skating were...
Tips for New Interns: How to Curl into the Fetal Position
We can certainly feel for all those interns starting this month: their minds are spinning and their cardiac rhythms are just shy of V-tach....
Physical Exam Tips: The Nervous System
The physical exam of the brain and nervous system can be broken down into two parts: the lumbar puncture and everything else.
Lumbar Puncture
The lumbar...
Fancy Medical Terms and What They Really Mean
Nurses and doctors use fancy words to communicate and sound smart before patients, families and each other. Having spent most of his adult life...
So You’ve Been Hit by a Stray Dart, What to Do Next
It happens all the time. You're hanging out at a bar or friend's house playing a game of darts, when - BAM!! - a...
Physical Exam Tips: The Heart
In this series, we review the physical exam, the intermediate step in a patient evaluation that ultimately leads to imaging. There are so many...
Tips for Patients: How to Use a Call Light
Nurses are incredibly busy. And by busy we mean doing endless charting. So much so that they're contractually not allowed to eat or urinate....