So I heard a crazy story in the halls the other day. It was about a case of a lady with very fat arms. Not that having fat arms is funny, it's not. But having arms fat enough that it causes a pannus that must be retracted for a blood gas is scary sad and actually, on a purely unprofessional level, quite funny.
Most people who become obese gather their weight in their mid section. They may get a six pack beer belly. Sometimes they also gain extreme weight on their upper thorax as well, which can make placing central lines an impossible task.
But people who earn the title of super morbid obesity gain fat on their extremities as well. That makes obtaining a blood gas difficult, even for the most skilled respiratory therapists, especially those that didn't get an online respiratory therapy degree.
In the case of this one lady, I heard the nurses talking about how her arms were so obese they needed an extra person just to stand there and hold her arm pannus up while the blood gas was obtained.
I wonder if the patient names her pannus like some people do. Perhaps for nurses, arm pannus retractor duty is one of the core nursing education requirements, equivalent to the right of passage for third year medical students navigating their surgical rotation as retractor extraordinaire on those four hundred pound patients getting their elective AAAs repaired.
Ah, to be a medical professional in the new American reality where everyone is obese and the super obese create daily havoc in hospitals everywhere. And it's only getting worse.
