The Ride with Christina Lee, MD
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This is The Nocturnous, Stories from the World of Medicine. I'm Emily Silverman. Today I speak with Christina Lee. Christina is an urgent care pediatrician in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BA from UC Berkeley, her medical degree from New York Medical College, and completed her pediatric residency at Children's Hospital Oakland. Ever since training, she's worked as an urgent care pediatrician at Palo Alto Medical Foundation. She lives in San Jose with her husband and two children. Before we speak with Christina, we'll hear the story she told at the Nocturnus in January 2020 about her experience working transport call during her residency. Here's Christina.
Racing across the Bay Bridge in an ambulance with lights flashing and sirens wailing was not how I imagined my nights off in residency. But that's where I found myself once while on transport call. I transported a lot of things in residency, sometimes specimens to the lab, especially the ever so coveted champagne tab, which is a perfect crystal clear specimen of spinal fluid from a perfectly executed spinal tab. Or sometimes I transport x-rays. Yeah, back in the day some patients had physical x-ray films, the kind you have to hold up to a light to see. Well they would inevitably get lost, so I would hold them in my arms and deliver them directly to the radiologist. But the most important thing I transported were patients.
In my residency, we did something called transport call, which meant if a patient from an outside hospital was really sick and needed specialized pediatric care in an intensive care unit, they would get transferred to our hospital and our transport team would go pick them up in an ambulance. The team consisted of two paramedics, a nurse, a respiratory therapist, or RT for short, and a doctor. Now, sometimes we would drive just 15 minutes away to a partner hospital, but sometimes we drove over an hour to a small community hospital with limited resources. They were expecting this specialized pediatric team. But little did they know, they were getting me, a second year resident who really didn't know anything about medicine.
Plus, there was the added stress of having to be ready at a moment's notice. Once I got the page, I had 30 minutes to get to the hospital. And the pages never came at a convenient time. Once I was in IKEA and my pager went off. And I was in the showroom and I couldn't find those shortcut exits. So I was stuck in this m maze of Scandinavian furniture, going around and around, seeing the same fake living room over and over again, and getting bad flashbacks of having to assemble furniture by myself at two in the morning. But as with everything in residency, I soon got used to the unpredictability of transport call. So for a couple weeks at a time, a few times a year, I was ready. I could go from regular person to transporter at a moment's notice.
I had my clipboard ready to go and a cheat sheet of common medications and ventilator settings. And after a while, It was kind of fun. We were the rescue squad here to save the day. We would each get our individual pages and arrive in the ICU and hear about the patient. Then we would gather any medications or supplies we might need, load up the ambulance and be on our way. The paramedics would sit in front, and they were the navigators.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–8:44
2
What motivated Christina Lee to share her ambulance transport story on The Nocturnists?
8:44–13:48
3
How does transport call work in a pediatric residency and who is on the team?
13:48–18:25
4
What challenges did Christina face when a page went off during an IKEA shopping trip?
18:25–32:44
5
Why was the transport of Tyler, the ten‑year‑old with terminal cancer, so impactful?
32:44–39:37