The American journal of emergency medicine
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A 75-year-old male patient suffered a chest degloving injury when he fell on his back and was run over by a small farm tractor he was pulling. At the time of patient admission, the paradoxical motion of the right chest wall was remarkable; and he had an open fracture of the right humerus, a dislocation of the right ankle, and a laceration of the right forearm. ⋯ Because the right flail chest was severe and there was a large amount of air leakage that continued under positive-pressure ventilation for pneumatic stabilization, we performed surgical fixation of the ribs and repaired the lung injury on the fifth hospital day. The patient's postoperative course was uneventful.
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We present the case of a 35-year-old woman with hypotension and abdominal tenderness after acute vomiting and syncope. The patient had been breast-feeding since the birth of a child 8 months earlier, was not yet menstruating, and felt that she was having a reaction to sushi. ⋯ Often, patients are too unstable or dehydrated to provide a urine sample; and serum human chorionic gonadotropin testing may be difficult to obtain in a timely fashion. This use of the point-of-care urine qualitative test has not been previously described and may be valuable in cases where rapid diagnosis is critical.