Right now I’m working several overnight shifts, so I work from like 10:00 at night until 7:00 the next morning roughly. Sometimes it’s 9:00 until 8:00 the next morning or 9:00 the next morning, but anyways, last night I had a shift. This was Saturday, overnight, October 30 and so in the early Halloween morning. I arrived at the hospital for my shift, I wasn’t sure how busy it would be. Generally Saturday nights are pretty busy at this emergency department with all kinds of things, car accidents, traumas, headaches, fights, heart attacks, strokes, lacerations, you know, everything you can imagine comes rolling in and on top of the usual given that it’s a holiday or day before a holiday where people go out and become exceedingly inebriated, I was prepared for just about anything. Parties, public drunkenness always increases what we are going to see in the emergency department.
I got to the hospital, and it was kind of busy, not super busy, but it started off with a unpleasant case which was a rape and when somebody is raped and presents to the emergency department, there is something called a rape kit, which is a actually a legal document. It’s a kit that once it’s opened, has to be kept with the same person the entire time until it’s handed off to the detectives. So, it’s always a difficult handful of these I’ve had to deal with and treat and basically it is a very unpleasant experience for everyone involved, but particularly obviously, the victim and so you try to be extra sensitive and not have them repeat their stories a bunch of times. But you also have to do quite a few invasive things and procedures to document and collect evidence. I won’t go into all the details because I’ll try to keep this a somewhat pleasant blog, but there’s no way to keep this pleasant.
Anyways, the rape kits tend to take a long time and are complicated. The data has to be gathered, clothing, specimens and fluid and all this has to be documented a certain way and then handled in a way that you can then turn it over to the detectives at the end and so that was a tough case to start with, and then throughout the night I had various different cases, some complex, some not so complex, and ended up seeing quite a few patients.
I had a gentleman that presented, originally I was told it was a pilot, who had been beat up. When I went in to the room to examine the patient, it turns out it was a drunk person dressed up as a pilot at a bar who had fallen over, become injured and had several lacerations on his face that needed to be sewn up. So, it was quite humorous and a lot of the staff thought that this poor pilot’s been attacked, but in reality it was a drunk individual dressed as a pilot who had not been attacked, but had actually fallen over on his face and broke his nose and cut up his face. So, he was rather unpleasant, belligerent, intoxicated and I calmed him down and convinced him to let me suture his laceration closed and get the proper imaging studies and make sure he didn’t have a head bleed or anything like that, so that was kind of our more humorous case.
Often times in the emergency department the people you are treating are inebriated or intoxicated on some substance. They don’t want to be there and they are rude. They’ll try to spit on you, try to hit you, try to attack you, yell and scream at everybody and generally make everybody’s night a little more miserable. You’re trying to help them and trying to fix their wounds or illnesses and it’s definitely not very appreciated. In fact, you often have to be careful or you’ll catch a fist yourself or be kicked or spit on or whatever, so that case was a little bit humorous though because everybody was worried about his pilot that turned out to be really just a drunk bum dressed as a pilot in the spirit of Halloween. So that case was interesting.
So this is a small sampling of just a couple of interesting cases from the night. I had several. I am on overnight the next several nights so I’m sure I’ll have more stories to tell and to share, but in the meantime, be safe, don’t drink, don’t do drugs, don’t eat too much and wear a helmet and wear your seat belts and be safe.
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