September 11, 2007

• Stories from the Night Shi(f)t

  Night shifts are always so much more exciting.

  The shift began with an 82 year old double amputee with dementia. If you have ever tried to get a history on a patient with dementia, it can be quite frustrating, as often the patient has no idea why they are at the hospital if they even know they are sick at all. Thankfully it only took 15 minutes before this gentleman told me he lost his legs due to cancer, before i finally gave up and called the nursing home learning it was in fact due to diabetes. Reinforcement of the fact that patients lie, even when they dont mean too

  Continued on with several traumas, the saddest being a 27 year old with multiple GSW (gunshot wounds) to the arm, chest and back. I had my finger IN HIS LUNG. It was squishy. This is because he could not breath and the surgeons had to cut a hole in his chest and insert a chest tube to drain blood and prevent a pneumothorax (hole in lung possibly secondary to bullet) Of course once the initial incision was made it had to be widened enough to insert a tube, so poke poke goes the josh until a ridiculous amount of blood began spurting from the wound and the tube drained it. 700 ml to be exact. That is almost a coke bottle full of blood. This was not even the first time the guy had been shot, since he told us he had previous bullets in his leg and elbow. clearly someone with a lot of friends. The sad part is he kept calling for his baby mama* who according to the police was DOA with brain matter somewhere on the streets of chicago

  *My sympathy for the guy aside, I cannot stand the phrase baby mama or baby daddy, and if i ever catch you saying it i will silently judge you.

  But that is a depressing story to end on, so let me digress over to two psych patients. Why? well because at some point during the night one of them decided to just go poop in the middle of the hallway. Of course, since no one was paying attention, it was a while before it was noticed. And while we were able to narrow it down to one of the psych patients, each one kept blaming the other for it. Poor housekeeping. They have to clean up all sorts of shit (sometimes literally) in this place.

  Another patient, who i did not see but heard about from one of the other attendings, was a non-psychiatric patient, just an african american lady (95% of the patient base in the ed i work at is black or hispanic) who just walked over to the window in her room, lifted up her gown and popped a squat right there. That makes me sad and amused at the same time

  • 2:32 pm
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