The April newsletter is now available! Click the image below or the link at the bottom to download. This month’s topic is Prehospital.
In this issue you’ll find articles on:
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Hematuria ranges from microscopic to gross. Microscopic means blood that can only be seen with a microscope, and gross means visible to the naked eye. In trauma, we only care about gross hematuria, which ranges from the faintest of pink to the deepest red.
In trauma, gross hematuria is a result of an injury to kidney, ureter or bladder. Blunt injury to the ureter is so rare it’s reportable, so you can pretty much forget that one unless the mechanism is extreme. So you really just need to focus on kidney and bladder.
Any victim of blunt trauma that presents with visible hematuria needs to be evaluated by CT of the abdomen and pelvis with an added CT cystogram. Standard CT technique is done without a urinary catheter, or with the catheter clamped. Only 50% of bladder injuries show up with this technique.
CT cystogram is an add-on to the standard CT, and consists of the administration of contrast into the bladder which is then kept under pressure while the scan is done. Delayed slices through the pelvis after the bladder is depressurized and emptied is routine. Nearly 100% of bladder injuries are detected using this technique.
If the CT shows a renal laceration or hematoma, the patient should be admitted and managed according to your solid organ injury protocol. Kidney injuries fare better that livers and spleens, and only rarely require surgery. If no kidney or bladder injury is seen, the default diagnosis of a renal contusion is the culprit. No treatment is needed, and the patient can be discharged if no other injuries are present. The blood will clear over a few days, but may disappear and reappear a few times in the process. The patient can followup with their primary care physician in a week or two.
There was a well-publicized and tragic case of mistaken identity after a motor vehicle crash in Indiana about 8 years ago. A van carrying several college students and staff crashed, resulting in multiple fatalities at the scene. Survivors were transported to a Michigan trauma center, and it wasn’t until five weeks later that the identity mixup was discovered.
One of the fatally injured students and one of the survivors were both female, blonde, and about the same height and size. Their identities were not confirmed because the next of kin of the deceased was advised not to look at the body. And the face of the surviving woman was significantly contused and she had sustained multiple facial fractures. She remained comatose and intubated for over month after the other was buried (by the wrong family, it turns out). After extubation, she began correcting people who called her by the deceased woman’s name, and the correct identification was finally made.
How can this happen?! It’s not as difficult as it might seem, for a number of reasons:
It is neither practical nor safe to delay transport from the scene in the interest of obtaining positive identification. And hospitals have even less information than prehospital providers, whom they rely on almost exclusively for accurate data.
What can be done to avoid a case of mistaken identity? EMS and hospitals must develop protocols to follow in any case where multiple patients are treated at once. The baseline assumption must be that the identities are unclear or unknown until definitively made, and preferably from multiple sources. What are these definitive items?
However, remember that every one of these can be made in error. This is why multiple sources are so important. If in doubt, the patients should remain a “Doe” and not be given a real name.
If you have specific protocols or policies, please share them with me by email so I can post them!
One of the hallmarks of urethral injury is blood and the meatus in males. The standard answer to the question “how do you evaluate for it?” is “retrograde urethrogram.” Unfortunately, too few people know how to perform this test, and not all radiologists are familiar. Many times it falls to the urologist, who may not be immediately available.
The technique is simple. The following items are needed:
Pour 25cc of contrast and 25cc of KY jelly in the specimen cup, cap it and shake well. Draw the contrast jelly up into the syringe. Under fluoro, insert the tip of the syringe into the penis and pull the penis toward yourself, pinching the meatus around the tip of the syringe. Slowly inject all the contrast, watching the contrast column on the fluoro screen. Once there is easy flow into the bladder, you can stop the study. If you see extravasation into the soft tissues, stop the study and call Urology.
The advantages to using this technique are:
Normal urethrogram:
Abnormal urethrogram:
The April Trauma MedEd Newsletter will be released to subscribers this Thursday. The topic is Prehospital. Articles include:
Anyone on the subscriber list as of 8PM Wednesday (CST) will receive it on May 1. I’ll release it to everyone else next Monday via the blog. So sign up for early delivery now by clicking here!