【老外说】在医院工作40年，给他印象最深的是什么？

Well, I can tell you some interesting stories. Have you ever had anesthetic (麻醉)?

Anesthetic is (used) when you are put to sleep for an operation.

Well, in the early days, and I’m talking about the early days when I started in 1987, they used an induction agent (诱导剂) called Pentothal. Have you ever heard of Pentothal? You might have. It’s an interesting drug.

The interesting thing about Pentothal is that, if you ever read any spy novels, and I’m thinking particularly of James Bond. Have you heard of James Bond?  

James Bond is a fictional character of a series of novels that were written about a secret service in Britain, in the UK. He was a superhero when I was growing up. And there are still James Bond movies. I think there’s a new James Bond movie that’s about to hit screens in the not too distant future. 

But anyway, from time to time, in various James Bond movies, people were given truth serums (吐真剂). And the truth serum is sodium Pentothal（硫喷妥钠). I did a lot of work in what we call the postanaesthesia care unit (麻醉复苏室) and that’s where people go to immediately after their operation until they wake up properly, until all of their systems stabilize and they go back to the ward（病房）. So all of these people would come out to the postanaesthesia care unit where I work. They had all had sodium Pentothal. And they would tell me the most amazing things about their lives, because unbeknownst (在不知情的情况下) to them, they had been given the truth serum.

Sometimes some of the things they would tell me were very funny. Sometimes the things that they would tell me were very naughty things that they probably shouldn’t have told me. There was a move from sodium Pentothal to a drug called Diprivan (丙泊酚). 

Do you know of Michael Jackson? Michael Jackson had trouble sleeping. And he was being treated by a doctor who was giving him intravenous (静脉注射) Diprivan. So he was affected with it every night. He was being given an anesthetic. So he was being given Diprivan. And Diprivan is a completely different drug to sodium Pentothal. And of course, when Diprivan become widely available the idea of people talking their heads off (大谈特谈) in the postanaesthesia care unit, that disappeared. 

I was also a midwife(助产士). So the hospital that I worked at was doing a lot of cesareans (剖腹产). Do you know the meaning of caesarean？Well, a cesarean is a surgical birth. So where Americans often talk about it as C-section. So it’s where a woman’s abdomen and uterus (子宫) is opened by this technique and the uterus in the abdomen is sliced up. So that’s a cesarean section or C-section whatever you want to call it. 

One occasion there was a woman who came out to the postanaesthesia care unit, having had a cesarean section. And she’d been out there she was in my care for might be ten minutes, and she said ‘I don’t feel very well.’ And then she died. And that’s not, well, it’s an interesting story, but it’s not a very happy story.

I guess what that told me was that people often, after they have a cesarean or a c-section, often they would have had an epidural anesthetic (硬膜外麻醉 ) or they will have a spinal anesthetic (脊髓麻醉). They are wide awake, they have no pain, no discomfort whatsoever. This woman with cesarean, she had an epidural and she came out to the postanaesthesia care unit, and to all intents and purposes (实际上) everything was fine. Her blood pressure was fine, her pulse was fine. She was breathing, well, everything was perfectly OK. But the problem was that she had liver failure as a result of the pregnancy. And those issues came to a head (达到最高点) immediately after she delivered her baby. 

So if that’s interesting, that’s certainly one of the things that happened. Many other things occurred. That was probably the most traumatic (痛苦的) for me and for that person and her family. It was her first baby. And she was unable to be revived (复活).

 The doctors tried for hours. They managed to keep her heart going all of that time, but couldn’t stop her bleeding. She basically bled to death, but her liver was the problem and her liver had abruption (分离) as part of the complications (并发症) associated with the pregnancy.

大家还想听“老外”说些什么？欢迎留言哦