When the Music Died
Illustration / Photo-credit: Saniya Kamal Imagine yourself as an ER nurse or physician. Then imagine a parent bringing to you their dead child, with the expectation that you will bring her back to life. What do you do? This happened to me, yet again. The overhead page for pediatric resuscitation was met with the routine ‘rapid response team’ deploying itself from the pediatric ward to the ER ‘resus’ room. There we met a distraught father who had brought in Sasha, his 2-year-old daughter. Once I took stock of the situation, I realized this was a no brainer: I was to follow the pulseless and apneic child (that is, neither heart nor lungs functioning) algorithm from the American Heart Association’s Pediatric Advanced Life Support guidelines. “Dead child -> go directly to Cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) -> do not pass Go, do not collect $200!” a professor from my residency years would remind us, specifically for that situation. I im...