Emergency Neck Airway in Theatre

I am a doctor and last year I was working on ear, nose, throat surgery.

At about 4am, I received a panicked call from a ward nurse that they had put out a medical

emergency call for one of our patients. To cut the jargon, he had had a neck operation a week

before and had come back that evening complaining that it hurt, so we kept him in

'just in case' overnight so he could be seen by the team in the morning. Anyway,

something in his neck had gone very wrong and evidently eroded a blood vessel, and when I arrived

the man was coughing up copious amounts of blood and his neck was swelling up.

We rushed the patient over to the operating theatres to try and get some help because the situation