North Shore
North Shore-LIJ is an award-winning health system that includes world-class tertiary hospitals, a nationally distinguished children’s hospital, a renowned psychiatric facility and a mosaic of community hospitals, as well as a range of health and wellness programs.
The North Shore-LIJ Health System strives to improve the health of the communities it serves and is committed to providing the highest quality clinical care; educating the current and future generations of health care professionals; searching for new advances in medicine through the conduct of bio-medical research; promoting health education; and caring for the entire community regardless of the ability to pay.
At Northwell, we strive to improve the health of the communities we serve and are committed to providing the highest quality clinical care; educating the current and future generations of healthcare professionals; searching for new advances in medicine through the conduct of biomedical research; promoting health education; and caring for the entire community regardless of the ability to pay.
As surgeons, we’re taught to think like this from day one of medical school. In order to stay focused on the tasks at hand and do our jobs quickly and effectively, we’re told, we need to disengage and think about the disease or problem we are treating—not the person lying on the operating table.
For most of my neurosurgical career, I took these edicts to heart. But all that changed about three years ago, when I almost lost a patient on the table.
I was operating on a 40-year-old woman with a cerebral aneurysm, a small balloon or blister that grows from a larger vessel of the brain. Appropriately nervous about brain surgery, she had delayed the surgery for a few months until she was ready. But I had reassured her that she was a relatively low-risk case, with a less than 1 percent chance of death.
When I spoke to my patient just before her surgery, we discussed when she would go home and how presumably straightforward the procedure was. We talked about the “creative” haircut we’d be giving her, and she smiled and laughed, happy to finally be putting the surgery behind her.
All was going according to plan until about halfway through the procedure, when my patient’s artery began to bleed. It wasn’t significant at first, but the bleeding quickly worsened. I knew I had a major problem on my hands—if I didn’t stop the bleeding, the woman would die on the table.