Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Weekends Suck

My weekend seemed to have "theme nights" all weekend long. I worked with the same doc all weekend and he is one of my favorites, so that is probably the only reason I did not sign myself in under Sunday night's theme. On Friday night, we were like trauma central. 8 level 2s, 4 level 1s, including 2 peds, 2 trauma arrests, including 1 ped. That is my kinda ER night, we were humping all night long, but I actually felt I did some good in the world. We also had 1 heart alert (our jargon for a heart attack that needs to go to the cath lab), a stroke alert, 2 full arrests and a head bleed that turned into a full arrest. I also think there was 4 intubations. For the first time in a long time I felt like I was doing true emergency medicine and not free clinic work.



Then on to Saturday night. That was the march of the vaginas night. And, of course, all of the male nurses in my department were on my end, so I ended up being tootie girl all night. I think I did 9-10 pelvics with the doc that shift. I felt like I needed some kinda symbol like batman, except it would be a kinda inverted leg symbol for them to flash when they needed me and I would come with speculum and swabs in hand, rolling the pelvic cart. I have a theory about pelvics and the weekend that has to do with a long, wild night on the town, followed by regret and fear, and winding up in the ER, because 2-4 am is consistently tootie hour. You can bet on any given night between those hours, there will be at least 1\3 of the patients out there females complaining of lower abdominal pain and\or vaginal bleeding.



Sunday night, this was, the loony bin let everyone out with weekend passes and they wound up in our ER. Over half of the patients on our end that night were psych evals, and every single patient I had was a psych eval, save 2 traumas. And these were not run of the mill psych evals either. These were scary crazies. 1 one mine had beat up 5 cops, while in handcuffs, sprayed 4 times with pepper spray and tasered 5 times, I am not exaggerating one bit. I also think I forgot to mention that he was about 6' 5 and weighed no less than 350. the only good thing about this guy, was he seemed to like the nurses, so he ended up not being too bad, until he would catch sight of the security guard that was posted at his room, then he would go ballistic again. the worst thing about our new ER and psych patients is that we no longer have a psych eval room, so we have to pull everything out of the room before putting the patient in it. This gets tiresome, and crowded when over half of the patients are there for psych evals and so your hallway is full of stuff from all of the rooms. The other bad thing was I had an attempted suicide placed in a room that was not visible from the nursing desk, so until she went upstairs, I practically had to hang out right by her room, so nothing could happen. I am so glad the weekend is over!!!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for writing this.