Volume Overload

Congestive heart failure is one of the core concepts learned in medical school. When the heart is unable to push fluid forward, it backs up into the lungs and the rest of the body, as demonstrated by the chest X-ray shown above.

The principle was clearly illustrated this last call when my team was on "Super Sunday" (when we cross-cover all the medicine patients in the hospital). On Saturday night, the hospital was bolused with a huge number of patients; 17 patients were admitted overnight. Normally on Sunday, the "on call" team takes 12 total and no other teams pick up patients. But given this extraordinary number of admits, the chief residents had to activate the short call and pre-call teams, giving them patients when they normally would not get any. The pump - the admitting team - simply could not move things along. The entire hospital was volume overloaded and patients were backing up into services that should have been free. It was somewhat of a nightmare since if we did not try to break the cycle, it would get worse and worse.

We ended up taking 13 patients total (one more than we usually do and three more than we do at the valley). It was fairly painful but we had to relieve the pressure on the system and allow services to diurese patients. I've never seen something like this happen before, and when it does, the system can barely handle it.

Image from Wikipedia, shown under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License.