Things change. As a teen, premed, and medical student I thought I would love the ER. Drama. Adrenaline. Gore. Rescue. Codes. Excitement. The stories from my trauma surgery rotation were awesome. Real doctors saving lives.
Well, I changed my tune the first month of residency. A few weeks after my hood and M.D. degree began to gather dust I found myself in the UNMC ER. I hated it. I wasn't prepared to handle complicated traumas. I wasn't confident enough to send people home. I was anxious without a scheduled list of patients I knew, or the time to get to know them. And I was never so glad to start back to back months of inpatient hospital rotations. Despite loving to suture, not minding the blood and unpredictability of delivering a baby, and enjoying solving a complicated medical case once in a while, ER was clearly not what I was cut out to do.
After that month I've avoided the ER. I had to do two more weeks when I started in Grand Island, and thankfully, that wasn't so bad. I had a little more experience, a little more confidence, and a little more support from the staff. Still, you didn't find me signing up for extra shifts, and you couldn't pay me enough to lose years off my life while moonlighting in some small town all by myself.
Well, my avoidance couldn't last forever. This month I've been working in the small town of St. Paul to fulfill a requirement for residency. (Ironic, isn't it, that I picked the shortest month of the year?) Part of the job for most small town doctors, including mine for the month, is covering the ER. No ER doctors. No trauma surgeons. No orthopedists. No stroke team. No cath lab. Eek! With 5 of 6 ER call nights in the books, I'm glad it's almost over.
Yesterday was my busiest ER day so far. Sure, I'd had 3 or 4 patients at once before, but most of those patients could have been taken care of in the clinic. Nothing "emergent." Nothing broken, bleeding, dying, infarcting or seizing. Yesterday, was different. As I was waiting for labs to come back on a woman with abdominal pain, a guy came in screaming with leg pain after falling off of a roof. (What he was doing on the roof during a blizzard is beyond me.) As X-ray was taking his picture, I overheard the scanner report that a 40 year old was coming in with a probable tibia fracture after an accident. Then, before the nurse could get up from the desk the phone rang with another ambulance calling in with a kid who hit a tree sledding. This all after we had just cleaned up after the seizing, questionable stroke, vomiting, supratherapeutic and bleeding, vasculopathic, elderly patient. Is it time to go home yet?
Actually, it all went fine. I felt a sense of accomplishment, and probably some unhealthy pride, when it was all over. Still, I am happy that my days of covering the ER forever are numbered - one to be exact.
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