Yesterday, I woke up at 5:30 am, ate a banana, took my vitamins, fed the dog, and drove the ten miles to work in the Emergency Room. Our first patient was a visually impaired elderly gentleman who had been struck by a car while walking to the tennis court to meet his friends. He sustained a broken leg, both shoulders were dislocated, and he had a brain hemorrhage. We did what we could, then transferred him to the Intensive Care Unit with a ventilator breathing for him.
Over the next few hours, we saw a seven-year-old boy who had nearly amputated his thumb with a pocketknife, two seizure patients who were actively seizing, a paraplegic man with an acute urinary infection, three patients complaining of chest pain, one of whom was having a heart attack. We also saw a dialysis patient needing emergency dialysis treatment, three cases of nausea and vomiting, three cases of vaginal bleeding, one threatened miscarriage, a couple of sprained ankles and a corneal abrasion.
Then we had breakfast, and it went downhill from there.
People go to the ER when they have a medical or traumatic emergency, when they are pregnant and start to bleed, when their child has a 105 degree fever, when they sprain their ankle, when they get a bad sunburn, when they break their wrist, when they have a seizure, when they’re too drunk to walk, when they have a severe headache, when it burns to urinate, when they have a bad cut, when they’ve had a stroke and can’t move their right side or talk, when they have a heart attack, when they’ve vomited all night, when they have abdominal pain, when their water has broken, when they have rectal bleeding, when their eyes turn yellow, when they get bitten by a stray cat and need the rabies vaccine, when it’s cold and they haven’t eaten for a few days, when they have a bloody nose that won’t stop bleeding, when they’ve swallowed forty aspirins and twenty-five antidepressants because life is too hard to bear, when their husband has beaten them for the fifth time.
And some of us go there when it’s time to go to work.