geeking out!

I saw the coolest x-ray today! (I mean, I'm sure there are cooler x-rays out there, but this is by far the most interesting from a patient I've actually taken care of.) I wish I had a picture... maybe I'll try on Monday.

The patient is an elderly man who looks very malnourished (skin and bones!). He lives alone and had fallen, and now has a painful hip that he can't move. The resident with me also noticed a hernia, but the patient wasn't too cool with us looking down there... Usually there's a report on the computer with the radiologist's impression of the x-ray, but it was missing for this patient. We opened it up on the computer and BAM! We all just gasped and stared for a second. First, most of his colon was in his scrotum (huge hernia!), and the entire head of his femur had broken off and the remaining bone was pulled upward- so if his leg hadn't been bent, we would have noticed it was shorter. Can someone say 'orthopedic surgery consult'? ...and probably GI too. The crazy thing about this patient is that he's got no medical history, zero medications, and hasn't seen a doctor in over 20 years. Oh, and he has no teeth so his speech is extremely incoherent.

Only week 1 and already some pretty interesting stuff. Looking forward to more...