It was another hectic day for our Los Angeles hospital’s infectious diseases service, and the pages were coming in droves. As a result, my team—a senior doctor in training (the “fellow”), two residents, an intern, and a medical student—had fanned out to different floors of our sprawling university center. One of us would evaluate patients with pathogenic bacteria in their blood, one would weigh patients’ requests for prescription antibiotics, and the others were planning to review X-rays and scans belonging to the afternoon’s latest arrivals: a man with a post-op fever, a woman with a suspected brain abscess, and a transplant patient with a worsening brassy cough.
After these tasks were done, we would regroup and begin checking another dozen sufferers in the hospital’s various ICUs and wards. It was going to be a long, intense day.
But for the moment, I had a little window of time. Ahhh, I thought as I sat back in an office littered with journals and empty coffee cups, I can finally answer some voice mail. Just then, my beeper trilled its familiar tune. Punching a button, I squinted and read: “Can u come to ER? Amazon backpacker claims something alive in arm.” Well, I thought, what’s the point of doing an infectious diseases rotation without seeing one of these? I quickly dialed the fellow in my group.
