WILTIMS #411-12: Where is everybody?

My team at the hospital is weird because our unit doesn't exist. The 7A team is on the seventh floor in the A wing, the 9B team is on the ninth floor in the B wing. My 8D team... has no physical location. There is no D wing. This means that our patients are scattered to the wind in a half-dozen other units, and frequently so is each member of my team. Group text messaging has never been more useful, as we run between the various floors in search of each other.*

YesterdayIL: 85% of patients who achieve full remission from acute myeloblastic leukemia (AML) will have a recurrence. The problem with this disease is that chemo targets rapidly dividing cells and some AML cancer cells revert to a state of quiescence where they essentially go to sleep. The chemo kills all the active cancer cells but some of these sleeping cells wake up eventually, growing into full blown cancer again.

Also, somewhat counterintuitively, large volume diarrhea is likely coming from a defect in the small intestine. The small intestine normally absorbs about seven of the nine liters of fluid that flow through the GI tract every day. The large intestine only absorbs most of the remaining two. So if five liters of watery diarrhea are coming out, then it must be a small intestine problem, because the large intestine never even sees that much fluid (and can only handle about 2 liters maximum).

If a patient reports coughing up "a cup" of mucus in the morning, think either bronchiectasis or a lung abscess. Bronchiectasis is when the respiratory tree gets all stretched out and mucous can build-up in the enlarged passageways. A typical patient that may have an abscess is an alcoholic who vomits up some food, breaths it into their lungs (aspiration), and then the gut bacteria start multipying and eating away at the lung walls.

TIL: Spondylosis vs. spondylolysis vs spondylolisthesis. -sis: degeneration of the discs of the spinal column; -lysis: degeneration of the spinal bones themselves; -listhesis: slippage of one spinal bone forward onto the one below it.

*Floor numbers have been changed to make it harder to deduce anything about my patients incase any of my readers are creepy patient sleuths.