EMOttawa Blog

Acute valvular emergencies are uncommon, but when they present they can rapidly become life-threatening. Patients often arrive with undifferentiated respiratory failure, pulmonary edema, hypotension, or cardiogenic shock, and the initial diagnosis may not be obvious. Unfortunately, many of the reflexive interventions we rely on in emergency medicine, such as aggressive fluid ...

Small bowel obstruction (SBO) is a common ED presentation, and these patients are often in significant pain with persistent nausea and vomiting. While CT remains the gold standard to confirm the diagnosis, identify the transition point, detect complications such as bowel ischemia, and guide surgical management, it can often take hours to obtain. During that […]

The pos...

Valvular heart disease is everywhere in emergency medicine, but it is sneaky.  We see the older patient with recurrent dyspnea whose chest radiograph is unremarkable and BNP is only mildly elevated. We see the patient in shock whose physiology never quite fits sepsis. We see syncope without an obvious cause, recurrent episodes of heart failure, […]

The post

A Randomized Trial of Tenecteplase in Acute Central Retinal Artery Occlusion Ryan SJ, et al. N Engl J Med. 2026 Jan 29;394(5):442-450. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2508515.   Editorial:  Seeing It Through – Lessons from a Retinal Stroke Trial. Schrag M, et al. N Engl J Med. 2026 Jan 29;394(5):511-512. doi: 10.1056/NEJMe2514614.   Methodology: 4/5 Usefulness: 3/5   [...