Somber Sunday

   My first blog ridiculed the common perception that E.Rs are full of death and drama. Today I stand corrected. 

    My Sunday shift made the show E.R look like an episode of the Golden Girls.* It started off with a psych patient falling out of bed and screaming. This often tends to happen when people who are unable to walk try to anyway. 

    At around 11:00 AM, I am interviewing a patient. In the midst of my interview, a young woman walks in carrying her 4 year-old daughter and says "Please help my daughter, she is having trouble breathing." We quickly plop her daughter onto the bed, ask our old patient to go elsewhere, and we begin to try and rescue the little girl's airway. 

   

     Soon an entire team rushes in to help this girl out. They have me bag the girl, while countless nurses try to find IV lines and push medications to jump start her heart. Mom is outside crying and vomiting. The scene gets more chaotic as more and more people rush in to help. The girl's heart rate jumps to 200, and soon after it stops completely. CPR is begun, people are getting more frantic. 

    After 20 minutes of CPR Mom comes around and glances in. A female doctor puts her arm around Mom and says, "I don't think your daughter is going to make it." Mom collapses to the ground and screams at the top of her lungs. It was probably one of the worst scenes I have encountered in my entire life. 

       The trauma did not end there. Later on, a young guy came in after being hit in the head from a sporting injury. Unfortunately, he was hit in the part of the brain that controls his breathing. I don't know what came of him. I really hope he was revived.

 

       On the bright side, a doctor bought us all pizza....

  - Tommy

* The Golden Girls is a good show