An ER weekend

This weekend, I was in the ER from 7am-5pm on both Saturday and Sunday. Surprisingly, it wasn't too crazy! Maybe it would have been busier, or there would have been more traumas that came in, if I was there overnight. As it was, though, I still got to see and do a lot.

The most interesting case from this weekend was actually the first one I saw on Saturday. It was a girl who was the same age as me who had attempted suicide by cutting her arm in a few places with a kitchen knife. Needless to say, this was a pretty touchy situation, and she was just quiet and subdued the whole time she was there. When I was stitching her up, she hid under a blanket and refused to look at her arm. She got 17 stitches total over four cuts, and a referral to an inpatient facility since that's the policy at the hospital I'm at. I hope everything goes well for her.

Another interesting case was when one man collapsed in the parking lot and went into cardiac arrest right outside the ER door. He was quickly brought into a trauma bay and resuscitated with CPR and defibrillation. After he was stabilized and put on a ventilator, he was admitted to the hospital, and I don't know what happened to him after that. But, he was alive when he left the ER, and that fact alone is pretty incredible!

Other than those two cases, there was nothing else super interesting or eventful. The rest of the patients were, as usual, either adults with something quick and easy to fix or older people with so many chronic conditions and vague symptoms that they just got admitted to rule out anything crazy. The big scary things (heart attack, pulmonary embolism, stroke, aortic aneurysm) can present very differently in older people, so most people with a couple chronic conditions (basically everyone) gets the workup for all of those things.

I really like the ER! I'm pretty surprised that I like it as much as I do, because I was dreading this rotation initially. But, it's pretty much always busy, and there's always something interesting to think about. I'm actually wishing I had only two weeks in urgent care and three weeks in the actual ER, because it's so interesting and everyone at the hospital I'm at is pretty nice.

Anyway, that's it for today. Just two more shifts left - tomorrow 7am-5pm and Wednesday 12pm-10pm! Then I'm headed to Kansas for a four-day weekend with my amazing boyfriend before my next rotation starts! :)