EKGs and ABGs and NGs...OH MY!

Procedures are a medical student's dream. They are the times when you feel like you are providing some level of patient care. They are the times you are not just running an x-ray to the radiologist to be read or looking up labs on the computer. You actually get to interact with the patient and provide a service.

EKGs: Set-up the probes on the chest and run the machine. Quite simple, actually. Then sit with one of the residents who is nice enough to give you the time of day (like mine) and interpret the results to determine whether the patient has any sort of myocardial infarction (heart attack) or any sort of ischemia (decreased blood flow resulting in decreased oxygen delivery resulting in muscle necrosis). On a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the most exciting procedure EVER, this ranks around a 2.5 on the Fun-O-Meter.


ABGs: Acronym for Arterial Blood Gas. We basically stick a needle near your wrist where we find the pulse. Unlike a blood draw you are probably used to, where we go for your veins near where your elbow bends, for an ABG we need arterial blood. This procedure is pretty straight forward but the artery makes is tricky for us because it escapes from us sometimes. We try to find your pulse and stick the needle (picture at right) straight into it...but the artery can trick us quite a bit and we can end up with nothing. But when it does work on the first try (and you really don't want to stick a poor person too many times because these DO hurt) the pressure from the artery is so strong that it fills the test tube by itself, without us pulling up on the syringe! The Fun-O-Meter ranks this around a 3.9.

NGs: These are NasoGastric Tubes - basically a way for us to access your stomach (Gastric)...through your nose (Naso)! The tube is thread through your nose, while you are fully conscious because we need you to swallow so that the tube goes down the esophagus (which leads to the stomach) instead of the trachea (which leads to the lungs!) This is an exercise in some discomfort for the patient, as you can probably imagine! When we are done, we send a puff of air down the tube and listen with our stethoscope to the stomach to ensure the tube ended up in the right spot. Then, we order an X-Ray to ensure the tube has reached the right part of the stomach. Fun-O-Meter Ranking: 4

There are MANY other procedures: blood draws, IV access lines, and others I probably haven't heard of yet. And after doing 100s of the above named procedures, many other med students (and especially residents and doctors) get sick of them; but for the moment, I'm quite excited!