French - c'est que ce?

If you read the post about the vandals smashing up the train you'll probably wonder why I'm listening to French lessons on my iPod. Well the fact is that I had a sick French person in the Resus room whom I almost withdrew treatment from as he was so sick and spoke no English so I had no idea what was really going on. When I eventually got an interpreter in I realised my mistake and gave him the treatment that saved his life... Let me explain.

The French guy was brough into the A&E resus room with almost no blood pressure probably from an infection. He had had some sort of cancer in 2000 with metastases and was now a paraplegic due to some additional cancer in his back at T6 which had resulted in a spinal cord injury which had left him paralised "from the waist down". I hate to say that almost my first question to the resus staff was "what's his resus status? Is he for active treatment?" Nobody seemed to know so we went through the motions of looking for a source of infection and giving him a bit of IV fluid.

After about 3 hours the interpreter turned up and I was told the following...

He was only 59 but he had lung cancer in 2000 which was operated on and then he had radiotherapy and chemotherapy. In 2005 he was given the all clear and was symptom free. However, in 2006 he had some back pain and a bone scan revealed a spinal tumour. It was removed by French surgeons but during the operation they accidently severed his spinal cord and that's why he was a paraplegic - not because of the cancer. Since then he had been wheel-chair bound and had developed previous urinary sepsis which had resulted in High Dependency Unit Admissions for IV drugs to raise his blood pressure and antibiotics - from which he had made full recoveries!

At this point I started the IV Noradrenalin which brought his pressure up to normal and gave him tons of IV antibiotics (as his urine had some signs of infection) which made him feel better within minutes. Perhaps not the line of treatment you would got with for an end stage cancer patient (which is what I thought he was).

What pissed me off most was that I supposedly used to be able to speak French when I was at school and yet all I could say to the poor man was "can I have 6 slices of ham and some bread please" and "I like basketball" - what use was that. Hence I've started learning it again and listening to it on the mp3 player while I train up and down to work is a simple and easy way to do it.

Incidently... he did fine.