The Emergency Department

My 2 weeks in E.D. has swiftly come to an end. And, after all of that, I must say that I am a bit disappointed.  I have come to believe that I am plagued by a curse, a curse that leaves every department I rotate through as slow as a slug on a winter evening.

Each morning was begun with ICU rounds, where the lot of us packed up two trolleys with cassettes and plastic bags (and my box of nitrile gloves – I swear I am going to start a campaign to have them standard alongside latex ones on level 3!) and we picked up our portable machines, and marched our way through the 3 horseshoe shaped ICU wards looking for our little yellow cards, signaling that the patient in that particular bed needed a morning chest x-ray.  On my first day of this, I felt incredibly useless and in the way.  I was working with people who I had not previously worked with, and despite my mentioning numerous times “this is my first day up here, I’m not sure what I should be doing”, a couple people continued to assume I should know it all.  Not the mention the new breed of patients I became acquainted with: young women in comas with broken necks, middle-aged men with breathing tubes and aortic pressure pumps, folks with H1N1 and fungal pneumonia, older patients with cerebral palsy, attempted suicides – the whole gamut!

Aside from these exciting ventures, though, my first week remained quite uneventful, with lots of chest x-rays, and lots of meeting new people who weren’t all quite so fond of… well, maybe it was the American bit?  Not sure.  I was feeling quite defeated come that first weekend. I was frustrated, exhausted, and feeling quite low.

I was determined not to let the second week be so bad. Monday morning I got my box of nitriles, and took charge of one of the carts.  I was happy to see faces I recognized from my first month at the hospital, and I tried to be as helpful as I could. I started putting my name on exams, determined to try and comp them, and I actually felt like I was ‘allowed’ to try positioning.  It paid off, and I got to take some x-rays of a nail through a finger, I went to surgery and saw a gentleman’s Sphincter of Oddi give birth to two of the most enormous gallstones I’ve ever seen, and I was able to squeeze in a ORIF of a wrist. 

And of course, just as quickly as I had started to finally feel useful, and was finally starting to enjoy myself, the week was over. I felt as though I was being sent on ‘time out’ and had to go to Level 2 after the weekend.