Wow, I'm finally back. I was beginning to feel really bad about not posting this entire time ...especially since I said I would start again come last Wednesday. My life is like that though, seems like I will set a self-imposed "due-date" and then it will be about a week later that I finally accomplish the said task. Without further ad due lets get back to the blogging.
My First ED Night
During easy months at my hospital (like GI elective) you have to do cross-cover shifts, which means that about 4-5 times a month, after you get done with your 7-5 job you then go work a 5-10p or 8p-2a shift at the Emergency Department. The emergency department is a scary place in medicine. There are a lot of crazy things that happen there.
I remember this one time as a 20 year old in college doing my time as a hospital volunteer in the ED. It's a bit "fuzzy" all the exact medical problems this guy had suffered, but the short and simple is that he fell off a construction scaffold and hit his head. They did a CT of his brain that showed a decent bleed, but for whatever reason he wasn't unconscious. The man started hallucinating and became aggressive, before he could be taken to surgery he took his 8 year old son hostage with a pair of scissors and tried to escape the hospital. They had us block the doors and a cop snuck up and grabbed him from behind...I really don't know how the story ended after that, as a volunteer you are about as medically uninvolved as you can get (all you do is things like take patients water, etc.)
Anyways, going into the ED for the first time as a doctor, just had this surreal feel. In retrospect, I may not have been entirely with it. I hadn't been sleeping well and on nights when I got home at any decent time I would get no break because I was moving into a new house, so that could be the reason for why I felt such a lack of excitement...if I could describe my how I felt the word would be "resigned"...at that point I was so burnt out I was going to just accept whatever came and deal with it at that time...I had no energy to waist on worrying at that point. As luck would have it my patients were fairly simple. I remember my first, it was a little 7 year old girl who had been bitten in the face by an unfriendly rat terrier..I think part of me expected her face to be hanging off in shreds...any second George Clooney would burst in yelling orders and the over head speakers would start playing that catchy TV music...but really she only had what looked like a small puncture wound on her cheek that had become swollen and red. It wasn't any rocket science what I did, I bet most people could treat her using common sense - I just ordered a saline wash of the wound and put a little medical "duct tape" on it (steri-strip) and wrote her a scrip for some antibiotics (George would be proud :P). The thing about the ED is it's much like the girl with the dog bite, not very TV worthy, sure you have the occasional crazy person or tumor, but in my experience it's not very often that the Emergency Department is very "Emergent". Most of the patients are not going to die in 5 seconds if you don't intervene, often it's busy enough that you'll sit in the room a good hour before you are seen and you'll be in there for about a 4-5 hour stint before they will admit or discharge you.
No comments:
Post a Comment