Time to talk about something that may upset some of you and that is anesthetic emergencies and deaths. To give you some background, I’m a licensed veterinary technician working in small animal general practice. We practice high quality medicine with around 10,000 patients. My forté is anesthesia and I pride myself in staying up to date will all of the modern day medicine surrounding it.
I come here to talk about an event in particular that still nags on me to this day. Now this was not my patient, I was in no way a part of her care other than being in the building and the ending result (as you will see).
The patient was a senior Pug. In for a routine teeth cleaning with many expected extractions. No cardiac workup was done prior to this procedure as it wasn’t deemed necessary for this patient.
I was in rooms that morning and responsible for another patient getting an ultrasound. I had sedated my patient and was rolling him into the imaging suite when I see a yellow number that says 90 on the dental patients’ monitor. Again, this was not my case, it belonged to my superior and I will forever kick myself for not saying something the first time I saw that number.
As I’m standing with my patient in ultrasound I hear the DVM performing dental extractions say that there was a problem with her patient. It’s at this point I drop what I’m doing and head over to the dental suite- thoughts racing through my head about that yellow number 90. You see, that 90 could be one of two vitals- respiratory rate or expired CO2. I was hoping it was the rate…. it wasn’t.
Sure enough, the patient was not breathing and just as I approached she went into cardiac arrest. I start chest compressions as one of co-workers push emergency drugs and the other gives breaths as needed. Through some grace of the universe, after 5 minutes of CPR the pug’s heart starts beating again and shortly after they begin spontaneously breathing. The DVM quickly sutures what she can in the mouth and about 10 minutes later the pug is awake and stable.
I think about this patient often and see it as a great success but also a failure as well. I find it hard to not blame the co-worker that wasn’t intervening with that number, but I can’t blame her if I said nothing as well. Our job is hard and we have to take the successes and failures together to learn the lessons we need to keep moving forward.
Please share your comments and questionable cases as well!