What happens when an emergency physician has no trauma bay, no team waiting beside him, and almost none of the tools he normally relies on? In this episode of Kaufman Chronicles, Dr. Noah Kaufman tells two extraordinary stories about taking emergency medicine into the wild. At a tiny Lake Tahoe ski clinic, he improvises an EKG from a single monitor lead and realizes a skier with chest pain is having a massive heart attack. Then, in Yosemite, screams from the forest lead him to a critically injured little girl struck by falling rock. With no ambulance beside him and no time to waste, Kaufman scoops her into his arms and runs through the woods toward the clinic, unsure whether she will survive. He eventually moves on, as emergency physicians so often must. Ten years later, her father tracks him down with news Kaufman never expected to hear. Along the way, Noah reflects on instinct, improvisation, the emotional armor emergency physicians develop, and what decades spent inside chaos can both give a doctor and slowly take away.

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Host:

Noah Kaufman, MD

Producer:

Dana Corriel, MD