Is Patient Abandonment in the Operating Room Ever Justified?

I ask this question mainly because there WAS an ENT who WAS sued (and settled) for NOT abandoning his patient in the operating room. [link] Imagine this hypothetical scenario... You are an ENT surgeon in a rural community hospital performing a fairly difficult but elective sinus surgery on a 12 years old child with cystic fibrosis with extensive pan-sinus nasal polypoid disease. Given the extensive nasal polypoid disease, a fair amount of bleeding is occurring which was not unanticipated. Suddenly, you ...

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Taste Changes after Tonsillectomy

Very rarely, patients will complain of taste changes after tonsillectomy. Such taste changes (aka dysgeusia) is most often described as metallic though other taste variations or absences may be reported. Depending on what study you look at, this complaint occurs anywhere from 0.3% to as high as 9% of tonsillectomy cases. Dysgeusia after tonsillectomy is felt to be due to a number of different causes including: 1) medication side effect 2) injury to the lingual branch of the glossopharyngeal nerve 3) zinc deficienc ...

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Brooke Burke Has Thyroid Cancer

Brooke Burke, TV personality best known for winning the 7th season of Dancing with the Stars and later co-hosting the show starting in 2010 announced in a self-published video the fact that she has thyroid cancer and will soon be undergoing thyroid surgery. Apparently, on a routine physical exam, a thyroid nodule was appreciated in July 2012. This was biopsied (presumably via an ultrasound guided fine needle aspiration) and came back as "atypical". Given atypical findings, a diagnosis ...

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Breathing or Voice... You Can Only Have One...

Sounds like a choice taken out of a morbid horror movie... "You can ONLY have one... Your voice or your breath..." The victim than loses one or the other after making a choice getting either the tongue or head cut off with a knife. But patients with vocal cord paralysis on both sides are essentially faced with this very question. Normally, the vocal cords (TVC in picture below) found in the voicebox move to accommodate talking or breathing. When the vocal cords are apart, breathing occurs allowing air to pass unimpeded ...

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Nasal Sounding Speech

There are actually TWO different flavors of nasal sounding speech. HYPO-nasal speech is due to reduced or no nasal airflow and HYPER-nasal speech due to too much nasal airflow. HYPO-nasal speech is by far the most common cause of nasal-sounding speech. It is similar to how a person would sound if they pinched their nose shut while talking. As such, ANY anatomic nasal obstruction would by definition lead to such hypo-nasal speech. Treatment, obviously, is to remove this anatomic nasal obstruction whatever it may be ...

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