Infectious Disease, Last Week

Things are going well with Infectious Disease still.  We've had a few interesting developments.  One of our patients, the homeless young female patient who has had altered mental status and been in full restraints for the past week and has systemic Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus infection has actually started to come out of it.  From the start she had altered mental status and we haven't been able to get an MRI to see how her brain is functioning, so we have had no way to know how her brain was doing.  Through this we were speculating that she had bacterial vegetations forming throughout her body that could be throwing clots to her brain, and she even grew MRSA in her spinal fluid, so it could have been forming microabscesses in her brain as well.  Not to mention the huge abscesses in her iliacus and piriformis muscles (anterior to the spine in the lower back, behind the abdominal viscera) that started the whole deal.  I think none of us were really expecting her to ever come back to mental awareness, and we had not seen her in anything resembling a lucid state since we started treating her.  

Today she woke up.  

For her it almost seemed like nothing ever happened - just saying "I'm hungry," and "I feel tired," like she'd had a really long nap.  Calm and tired, not thrashing about or pulling at her tubes or anything like that.  No alarm yet, maybe has a little bit of a drugged look (understandably), and we still don't know the extent of the damage of this week of MRSA sepsis, but she's lucky she had my preceptor on the case for her infection and such a good team of ICU specialists.  It's amazing - there are some patients who you really don't know if they will recover who somehow bounce back, and then there are others who look fine and are ready for discharge and they die that evening.  Definitely drives home how unpredictable medicine can be.  

That's not to say that I think we should do everything in our power to keep a human body running when it is beyond what a clinician would estimate is "the point of no return".  Some absolutely septic patients, with multi-organ failure, and other comorbidities like diabetes and obesity are still getting specialty bone scans and send out labs even when their lactic acid level is at 14, they are on 5 different pressor medications and their blood pressure is still not in control, their stats are steadily dropping, and they're on a ventilator.  There is a time and place for hospice and palliative care.  Some points that indicated that perhaps our homeless young woman might recover were the following: she was never on a ventilator, her laboratory values were never all that particularly horrible, she was young, AND she wasn't obese, diabetic, or suffering any other comorbidities that we knew of (aside from drug abuse).  It's amazing what diabetes and obesity will do to your survival rates in a hospital.