Repeat Repeat Repeat

I worked Friday and Saturday in the ED again, this time a swing shift, from 1:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. (actually 12:45 to 1:30).

As I was getting ready to go in for my Saturday shift, I felt exhausted and literally beat up. (I cut my head on one of the contraptions that hangs from the ceiling last night and didn't notice the dried blood on my scalp until this morning.) And one of my feet was not happy. I don't know if I stepped on it wrong and twisted it or what, but it hurt. (It still hurts. Fourteen hours on my feet surprisingly didn't make it feel any better.)

On Friday I saw, I don' t know, twenty or more patients, all the non-acute patients who should have gone to an urgent care center (or who went to an urgent care center and were sent to the ED). It was a lot of abdominal pain, back pain, headaches, etc. There was one case of imminent appendicitis that went straight up to surgery. I don't really remember the rest.

Yesterday I took out sutures and helped put in sutures. I looked at some poor fool's tendon--like, literally laid eyes, past skin and blood and muscle, on someone's tendon laid bare. I took care of three children, one of whom had fallen off a fake horse. I tried and failed to put an IV into someone who had blown out almost every accessible vein by shooting up drugs. I took care of two women who had been beaten up by their boyfriends. I took care of three young men with nondescript back pain. I took care of two young women with nondescript shortness of breath. I took care of a centenarian. And I took care of a middle-aged man who bitched and whined endlessly about the chest pain from the CPR that saved his life after he OD'd at a party. After about six hours of listening to him, I started to wish that the people around him had never heard of CPR.

My shift ended at just after one in the morning and I went outside to wait for Dave to pick me up. While I waited near the security guard at the entrance to the ED, I watched the slow, endless parade of homeless people go by.

I'll be so glad when my time in the ED is over. It's not for me.

Today I'm staying in bed, doing homework online. I'm about 4/5ths of the way done with what has to be done by midnight. Right now I'm writing a reflection journal about the two women who came in with injuries from their boyfriends beating them up. They blame themselves. They always do.

Later:

I tried to get out of the house and pretend to be normal. Dave and I went out for burgers and fries and we were going to go grocery shopping, but my foot said no. Dave ran into the store and picked up a few things that we need and then we came home via the giant fizzy drink store.

It's almost nine p.m. now. Way past my bedtime.