Back in fellowship, we used to discuss the various reasons why we’d be called back into the hospital at night when we were on call.<\/p>\n
Mind you, this was a fairly rare event, since unlike gastroenterology fellows doing emergency endoscopy for bleeding and cardiology fellows coming in to do the urgent cath, what were we supposed to do — the emergency 6-page consult note?<\/a> Plus, given the inherently-OCD nature of our field, often we were in the hospital pretty late to begin with.<\/p>\n (You don’t need to get called back to the hospital when you’re already there.)<\/p>\n But when it did happen, it often seemed to be one of the 3 M’s — meningitis, malaria, and mad surgeons.<\/p>\n I was thinking of these meningitis cases because here in Boston, a 12-year-old girl recently died of suspected bacterial meningitis.<\/a> There has been no micribiologic confirmation, but there’s enough clinical evidence for meningococcal disease that the Department of Public Health recommended that close contacts receive antibiotic prophylaxis.<\/p>\n This is a horrible, tragic case — arguably worse than bacterial meningitis in adults, for obvious reasons, not the least of which is that she was apparently healthy the day before. Like all meningitis cases, it has received a lot of media attention<\/a>,\u00a0and a fair amount of panic.<\/p>\n\n