Day 110, Science fiction loves the parallel universe, the alternate dimension, where the players are the same but everything is askew. Sometimes it feels like patients here are living in this twisted world, where their fate gets equally twisted.
I have a 27 year old man on the ward who is HIV negative and has become unwell over the last few days. He’s spiking fevers, bleeding from his mouth and now not talking. He’s most probably got an infection somewhere but it just doesn’t add up. Whatever it is may have cause bleeding elsewhere, with a particular possibility of a bleed into the brain.
So I send more blood tests, I get an xray of his chest, a CT scan of his head and then we get a diagnosis. I am able to find him a bed in an intensive care unit and he gets transferred without delay. He receives the right treatment and as the infection is controlled he wakes up and as is able to talk to his family and friends about how well he is doing.
In the parallel world the xray machine is broken. His blood tests take forever to come back and give us no clue of what maybe wrong other than there is a process causing him to bleed. The ct scan and intensive care unit are services in a far off hospital that even if they were functional they wouldn’t be able to accommodate him. The best guess treatment we can give has little effect and we watch as he runs out his clock. His mother sits by his bed looking at the various tubes going in and out of his body and asks what is wrong with him.
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