Peter Attia· MD
and it's funny one of the last traumas I was ever involved in as a resident was just one of those cases where the patient came in and he was responsive he had the tiniest tiniest stab wound so less than a centimeter wide under the xiphoid that's it so this is a guy who walks in who has a sub centimeter sub xiphoid incision i mean it could've been a shaving cut but he's been stabbed and he's more or less seems pretty normal vital signs are more or less what you would expect when I lay him down and do this ultrasound of his heart it really looks like there's something there but I can't quite figure it out and now the question is well he's obviously too responsive to warrant cutting his chest open which was what you would do in the emergency situation so you have to do the CT scan but of course the risk in the CT scanner is as fast as the CT scanner is he is still laying down on a scanner potentially ready to have a cardiac arrest for at least a minute and a half and usually what would happen is I don't recall in this case but a lot of times if you're gonna go through the trouble of doing that you're gonna do a contrast CT scan as well you're not just gonna do what we would call a dry scan with no contrast so now you've got the fumbling around of getting the iodine machine hooked up to him etc etc