Presentation

I mentioned the other day that I was working on a presentation. I gave it at M&M conference last night. Don't think this is a conference where we all eat the delicious candy that melts in your mouth (not in your hand). This is a far more ominous M&M - Morbidity and Mortality, or illness and death. In the world of medicine, most departments have these conferences at regular intervals - ours are once a week - and discuss bad outcomes. Sometimes no one is to blame, and we are trying to figure out what went wrong. Sometimes someone is obviously to blame, but in our department people are pretty good (for the most part) about not pointing fingers. The whole point is to learn from either mistakes or accidental mishaps and hope that prevents them from happening next time.

Well, my case did not really involve either M, thank goodness. What happened was that a surgery got delayed because of a less than thorough pre-operative evaluation by yours truly. It wasn't really very significant except an administrative hassle, no harm was done to the patient, but I am glad to accept blame. Anyway I did learn from it, and I also did the presentation on Sickle Cell Anemia in anesthesia and hopefully everyone watching learned a little bit from it. Chris was in the audience to support me which was wonderful! He learned more than he ever wanted to know about Sickle Cell. I think it went well, it wasn't as nerve racking as I had feared. I glanced out at my audience (approximately 20 residents and 5-10 attendings) a couple of times, and less than a quarter of them were sleeping, which is a huge compliment from this crowd. And the best part is that I won't have to present again for months, or at least I hope so...