Tuesday, March 31, 2009

My first night in the ER

Within the first hour I'm there, two people come come in with heart attacks.
A while later, this tiny Vietnamese lady comes in who speaks no English and hates doctors. She has this huge bleeding lump on her head that the family says has been there all day. The family swears she didn't fall, but as I'm sewing up wound, the CT comes back showing a significant subdural hematoma.
At the same time, this huge guy is brought in because he was found lying in the street, unresponsive, with white powder all around his nose. The rest of the shift was spent making sure this guy stayed very "relaxed" in a quiet room. With two police officers outside just in case we failed at relaxing him.
The rest of the shift was pretty laid back, until the end, when a really nice old lady comes in with all these crazy wounds. What happened? She was out with her tiny little old lady (or Zach Herbert) dog, and these two Great Dane mutts run and go after her little dog. What does this lady do? She grabs her dog and holds it above her head while these two dogs maul her. She had bites that seriously went to the bone. When neighbors came out and chased the dogs off, she was still holding her dog up. That's legit.

4 comments:

Joe said...

Love the old lady story. Jak-jak and leela have to fend for themselves. I believe in natural selection.

Cara said...

Wow wow wow. i hope Thomas reads this. He thinks his EMSA ER rotation will be boring. That doesn't sound like boring to me!

RTQ said...

Josh, would you hold me above your head in this situation...because the mental picture of that is awesome! Furthermore, can you please change the side bar to "eat by a cheetah?" It's more realistic. Thanks again for the package! I'm eating cookies right now.

Anonymous said...

aww, how sweet and also very sad. glad the lady's (relatively) okay. craziness. bring us more!