what's up everybody my name is max feinstein and i'm an anesthesia resident at the mount sinai
hospital in new york city if you walk around this hospital you'll see some people walking around
with these mysterious green bags and you might wonder who are these people? what do they keep
in their bags? the answers to these questions are these are either anesthesia residents,
anesthesia attendings, or CRNAs and what do they keep in their bags? that's what
i'm going to answer in this video if you find this video helpful or interesting i'd
really appreciate it if you like the video and subscribe to the channel let's dig into the bag
before i actually open the bag up i want to point out this one special thing that i use
to differentiate my bag from all the other bags which is a little keychain version of the toy
poodle that i have at home, kobe. is it just a little bit ridiculous that i spent ten dollars
on that keychain on amazon? maybe. but you'd be surprised how many conversations it starts up
with patients who are nervous and about to get ready for their procedures and are just looking
for anything to talk about that doesn't have to do with the hospital or their surgery so
probably one of the most important pieces of equipment that i keep in here is this piece of
airway equipment called the bougie which i can use to help intubate somebody if i'm having a
difficult time seeing their vocal cords and i need to go in blindly and in another video i'll talk
about exactly how this works but needless to say this is an extremely important piece of equipment
next up i keep a bunch of equipment in here to help monitor patients in certain ways the first
is of course a stethoscope which you know a lot of people carry around on their neck like this
but i try not to do this because if i'm in a situation where i'm intubating a patient
and i'm leaning over them like this i don't want my stethoscope to be dangling in their
face and in fact when i'm intubating i always put my ID in my pocket like this so i don't
want there to be anything that's going over my patient's face as i'm leaning over them
so anyways i always make sure that i keep my stethoscope handy and nearby
the next piece of monitoring equipment is called the nerve monitor which i use to see how many
twitches are left when a patient's been paralyzed and i'm getting ready to reverse them at the end
of surgery so it's really important that once the surgery is done if there's any paralytic
that i've given that i've made sure that all of that is reversed so when the patient's in the
recovery room or in the PACU they don't end up in a situation where there's still some
paralytic onboard and that causes them to have some respiratory depression which can of course
be disastrous for anybody especially somebody who's just come out of surgery and is recovering
you can see the nerve monitor has four different functions here and we use it on a
couple different parts of the body and again this is something i can talk about in a separate video
but needless to say it's a really important piece of equipment for making sure that a patient's not
paralyzed after surgery just be careful not to accidentally shock yourself on this thing
the last piece of monitoring equipment i always keep with me is a pulse oximeter which i
like to keep with me in case i'm ever in a situation where i don't have my anesthesia machine
or i'm not in PACU and i need to know a patient's oxygenation most often i use my pulse oximeter
when i'm going from the operating room to the recovery room and i'd like to check my patients
oxygenation while i'm on route this journey can take anywhere from 30 seconds to maybe a couple
minutes depending on how far the operating room is from the PACU and it's such a critical time
that i always just want to make sure that i'm keeping a close eye on how my patient's doing
of course pulse oximetry can also be useful if i've just climbed up several flights of stairs
and i'm feeling out of breath and i want to know truly how out of shape i really am
not bad! let's go ahead and keep that clean for actual patients i also like to keep an IV kit on
me at all times just in case the need pops up. so this IV kit is a little bundle that i made that
includes the following items: of course i've got a tourniquet which keeps it all together,
i've got a couple of 20 gauge needles, alcohol pads for skin prep, tegaderm and tape to secure
everything once i've got my IV in place, and some 4x4 gauze just to keep everything clean. i also
keep a saline flush on me just to make sure my IV works these next items aren't really for patients
they're more for me and the first of that is food so just in case i've gone a long time without
having anything to eat and i want to have a quick snack outside the operating room i always keep
with me a protein shake you know without actually looking too closely at the protein shake details
this bottle actually kind of looks like the tube feeds that we use in the hospital
and so some people see me around drinking this and they're like why is this desperate anesthesia
resident drinking tube feeds don't they feed him anything but rest assured it's an actual protein
shake and it's really delicious i also like to keep a little bar on me at all times too
in the front pocket here i always keep a phone charger on me never know when you're going to
run out of batteries and need more and i'd love to start my day listening to music while i'm
setting up my operating room so i always keep a pair of wireless headphones with me and the last
thing i'll show you here is this little baggie of special medications that i keep just in case
i find myself in a pinch and need something that can be a little hard to find sometimes
so that little baggie includes sugammadex which is a neuromuscular blockade reversing agent,
haloperidol or haldol which is an antipsychotic, vasopressin which is a vasopressor,
and hydralazine which is an antihypertensive and then these medications aren't exactly hard to
find but i always just like to keep them handy. so that's atropine, phenylephrine, ephedrine,
and labetalol and then the last few things i keep in here just miscellaneous one is this
thyroid shield which helps protect me from thyroid cancer when x-ray or fluoroscopy is
being done it also doubles as a nice necklace anytime i'm looking for extra style points
and then i also keep this fanny pack in here i don't use it but you never know
when the need for a fanny pack is going to arise so i always just have it here
just in case well that wraps up this video of what i carry in my backpack and if you want to see more
information about how i set up my operating room check out the video that i made on that
and if you're also interested in seeing what i keep in my medication cart in the operating room
check out the video i made on that thanks very much for watching and i'll see you next time
bye