In Limbo

Sunday night:

It's 1:30 in the morning and I am up studying for my final final. Yes, after this, my lectures will be finished. I have a few things to wrap up regarding my final rotation, and then I'm done with my degree.

I worked Friday and Saturday in the ER.

Friday was triage duty, and we probably triaged 90 or 100 patients. I came home feeling like I had been on punching bag duty. There were only a handful of patients who were rude or inappropriate, including one man who threatened the woman checking him in. He was chased out of the building by four security guards. There was an aggressive transexual patient. There was a stoned young woman who crashed her car into the car of the woman sitting next to her in the waiting room. (They were both brought in by ambulance.) There were a handful of chest pains (they get stat ECGs) and handful of abdominal pains (one of whom I believed, as she was pale and shaky and sweating bullets and she could only speak through a grimaced whisper, one of whom I didn't believe as he was giving an Oscar-worthy performance, groaning and crying and laying on the floor of the emergency room, which, don't ever do that. It's a fucking petrie dish.) There was a skinny young man, polite as all get out, and sick as a dog. He was a pale yellow color and everyone in the ER knew him. There was a middle-aged man who told us a story about traveling to Asia--for what purpose I can only cynically guess at--and came home with a nasty virus. We gave him a mask and sent him back out to the waiting room to wait his turn.

After twelve and a half hours of that parade, I came home, slept for a handful of hours, and eleven hours after I walked out of the hospital, I walked back into the hospital for more.

Saturday was a steady day. It was so steadily busy that I went in at 6:45 and finally got to eat my lunch at 4:00 p.m. We had a code in the early afternoon, a patient in respiratory arrest brought in by ambulance. I had to borrow a pair of shears to cut her clothes off. While I hooked her up to the monitor, the hyper-efficient EMT-tech did just about everything else. Above all of that, I was vaguely aware of the doctor and nurse calling out orders. Time does weird things in the ER and, though it was only my second code, I realized that time's weirdness squares in the trauma room. By the time we were wrapping up our duties, the respiratory therapist came in and started doing her thing. In the midst of all that, I had to put a urinary catheter in--the first one I've ever had to put in a real patient (not a mannequin), believe it or not. Putting in a urinary catheter for the first time during a code is a lot like trying to rewire a house while it's burning down.

At 7:00 p.m., the young man who we had relieved twelve hours earlier was back to relieve us and then it was time to go home.

I couldn't sleep that night, so I wrote my final clinical journal, about an elderly woman in limbo. The police were called by a neighbor or someone to do a welfare check on her and she was found alone, bedbound, in an overheated bedroom, so the EMTs were called to bring her into the ER. She did have a caregiver, one of her adult children--but he had been admitted to the hospital the day before and he hadn't said a word about her. She was not an ER case per se, but she clearly could not take care of herself so she couldn't go home and the son was refusing to have her placed in a care facility. The whole thing was a mess. When I left, she was sitting in bed trying to read.

Sunday I too stayed in bed most of the day doing homework. Dave took his mother to buy a new cellphone and when he got home, we turned around and went off to one of my favorite fabric stores. They were having a sale (it was the last day actually), and I bought a ton of fabric for cheap. After, we went for burgers.

I had put off studying all day for my final final, so I sat up into the night studying, got a handful of hours of sleep, and went off to take my final.

I just got home from that.