Sorry I haven't posted in a while, thanks to those of you who have stuck around.
Lately I have been doing the overnight shift. The bad thing about the overnight shift is that you walk into a messy department. The good thing is that by sunrise, everything has pretty much calmed down.
I have been involved in no small amount of trouble over the past week. There have been shootings, stabbings, and the usual strokes and heart attacks. For the size of this city, we do pretty good. One of my attendings says that working on the pediatric side is pretty much like practicing veterinary medicine, because the infants can't tell you what is wrong with them. I think the same is pretty much true of trauma patients.
I generally don't get much of a story from them. It's usually something along the lines of, "I don't know what happened, I heard gunshots and then I realized I had been shot." Or the more classic, "I was walking to church when this guy just walked up and stabbed me in the chest."
It is generally the next afternoon when I wake up that I get the full story. There's nothing like hearing that the guy you spent 3 hours resuscitating was part of a string of retaliation while you sip your coffee. Or that the guy that died got stabbed because he called his girlfriend a "fatty". Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, I guess. But then I guess it's better that we don't know what happened... easier not to develop a bias and all that.
Lately I have been doing the overnight shift. The bad thing about the overnight shift is that you walk into a messy department. The good thing is that by sunrise, everything has pretty much calmed down.
I have been involved in no small amount of trouble over the past week. There have been shootings, stabbings, and the usual strokes and heart attacks. For the size of this city, we do pretty good. One of my attendings says that working on the pediatric side is pretty much like practicing veterinary medicine, because the infants can't tell you what is wrong with them. I think the same is pretty much true of trauma patients.
I generally don't get much of a story from them. It's usually something along the lines of, "I don't know what happened, I heard gunshots and then I realized I had been shot." Or the more classic, "I was walking to church when this guy just walked up and stabbed me in the chest."
It is generally the next afternoon when I wake up that I get the full story. There's nothing like hearing that the guy you spent 3 hours resuscitating was part of a string of retaliation while you sip your coffee. Or that the guy that died got stabbed because he called his girlfriend a "fatty". Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, I guess. But then I guess it's better that we don't know what happened... easier not to develop a bias and all that.
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2 comments:
A night in the city has a hundred stories.
I think Silk just wrote the first line of the next great American novel!
Interesting perspective you brought, Kate. I never thought about being in the position like that. For example, if I was the one person keeping a child molester alive, would I do my absolute best? Wow....tough position to be in.
That's one of many things I love about your blog, how you humanize the face of all doctors for us, by sharing some of the unexpected thought processes behind the occupation.
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