All Bleeding Stops, Eventually (But: The Sooner The Better!).

Abstract

It's your first day as the surgery resident working in the cardiac surgery intensive care unit (ICU) and you are accepting the hand-off of a cardiac surgery patient that your senior resident has brought up from the operating room for admission to the ICU. During the handoff, your resident colleague tells you that the patient is 'oozing a lot and that the operating team, after a diligent search for bleeding sites, does not believe that the oozing is 'surgical.' She announces that your job will, therefore, be to stop the ongoing oozing, while, of course, being alert to the possible development of tamponade physiology.