Diary of a Nigerian Medical Student

Seeing a "Brought in Dead" Patient for The First time.

Hi dear ☺
Been a while.

So, I will be rounding up my stay at the accident and emergency unit by tomorrow and I have mixed feelings about it. I'll miss the consultant that has been with us most of the time we spent there because he really is a good teacher that is always willing to teach us, despite how busy he is at the unit because come on, it's A and E after all. There are always patients to attend to.  Happy to leave the unit to radiology unit because it's an opportunity to learn something new and again A and E is one hectic place to be in plus the cases seen there are always critical.

So, to the title of today's chapter, yes for the first time today I saw a patient that was brought in dead(BID). Sadly that patient was also a student, just like me 😔. He was a year 2 student, but I'm not sure of the department. Apparently his neighbors found him unconscious in his room and rushed him to the hospital where he was pronounced dead after our consultant examined him and noticed he has no pulse. After the confirmation, procedures were carried out so he can be moved to the mortuary. God rest his soul. Amen.

Other cases we saw today were a lady who had leg ulcers resulting from a complicated diabetes, and sadly she has visited the herbal doctors first because of ignorance, worsening her situation the more. At this point I'll advice anyone reading this to take their health seriously in time before it's too late. You can do that by taking regular check ups at least the vital signs like blood pressure and sugar levels. So, this woman was also severely hypertensive along with the diabetes.

Another woman we saw had breast cancer that had apparently spread to other parts of her body(metastasis). Ladies please don't forget to do regular breast examination to check for breast lumps that could be an early pointer to cancer so it can be managed earlier and not spread which can get deadly.

Another patient who was an elderly woman had congestive heart failure but wasn't so much in a critical condition.

That was basically a summary of everything my team and I saw today. It's 10:35pm now and I'm feeling really dizzy. So, goodnight until next time.

😘