Emergency Medicine

I'm currently rotating in the ER. I have to say I love it. I started last Monday and within two hours of being there I sutured up an arm. It was very exciting, as I'm used to working on raw chicken! I'm now working 12 hour shifts: 7-7. I'm currently working the day shift, but will probably pick up an overnight at the end of the week. The patients that come in the middle of the night are different than the kind during the day.

So basically my day goes like this: patient is triaged by a nurse, I go see the patient, come out and tell the doctor what I want to order/prescribe, he orders what I say, goes and sees the patient to tell them what we're doing, and figure out what's going on with them.

Some of my highlights besides the suturing are learning to read EKGs far better than I have been able to the last two years, a man who came in to deliver his overdue baby, my first acute abdomen, and the thankfulness of the families of the really sick people.

My two saddest moments: 1) An elderly woman who kept falling and breaking open her leg. We had to tell her she needed to go to a nursing home for rehab to get her strength up and she was just crying and telling us that going to a nursing home was her greatest fear. It just about broke my heart. 2) A baby who was seizing for over an hour. The mom was just sobbing. It was awful.

Oh yeah, I got ACLS certified this week too. This means I can now run a code. Yup that's right RUN A CODE. Like be the person in charge. Pretty scary if you ask me. My ER knows that I'm certified now. I'm slightly frightened this means in the next week I could be running a code so that I can do a real one...not one on dummies.