My phone calls
12:59 The phone ringing beside my bed startled me out of a deep sleep. The nurse on medicine was calling for bed 8, a teenage boy who had been admitted several days prior with a hemoglobin of 3.9 in the setting of an unknown bleeding disorder. Apparently the boy would periodically have nosebleeds at home throughout his life that somehow his family had previously managed to stop. Hemophilia A? B? Von Willebrand disease? Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangectasia? We will never know in this country. I found him laying on the ground with the nasal tampon in his R nare that I had placed 2 days prior and blood steadily dripping from his L nare now. He was snarfing and crying. I shoved a new nasal tampon in the other nare and blew it up as much as he could tolerate. Then I turned to the father and asked how many bags of blood his son had received since admission. He sheepishly looked around, and I turned to the nurse who reported he had still only gotten the one bag of blood we gave him from