This is what my anesthesia attending said to me following my first attempt at intubation on a live person, followed by, “You’ve seen The Matrix, right?”
Clearly, I was not exactly successful. Everything seemed to go smoothly, except for my initial difficulty wedging open the mouth of a woman who was missing, or in the process of, most of her teeth. Then we didn’t see her chest rise and fall with the next breath, and the end-tidal CO2 monitor didn’t record its characteristic wave with the next exhalation.
“And we’re in the esophagus. Been there.”
anna in med school 