Life in The ER

A few weeks ago, the police brought in someone to the ER for an emergency detention. An emergency detention prohibits a patient from leaving the ER if they are  mentally unstable who needs to get mental health treatment. It’s much more complicated, but that’s not the point of the story.

Anyway, this patient was extremely aggressive and non-compliant and was generally a pain in the ass. She had a few extreme mental health problems and she was very non-compliant with her medicine as well.

So, when the clinical psychologist came to evaluate the patient to see if they could be accepted at the mental health center, the psychologist accidentally got locked in the room with the patient.

Normally, we keep psych patients in rooms that are locked and can only be unlocked by scanning your hospital ID badge next to the door. Somehow, the door got shut behind the psychologist (it’s supposed to always be open when healthcare staff are in the room), and her ID badge malfunctioned and she couldn’t open the door. The patient saw this as an opportunity to practice their boxing skills and promptly began to assault the psychologist. Security managed to open the door somehow and rescued the psychologist, but not before she had acquired several injuries to her face.

Luckily, there were no bones broken and nothing required stitches. The psychologist was still fairly bruised all over her face. 

Overall, it was a pretty interesting night.

It’s been a really busy weekend but I have some really good stories to share once I get home

Working in the trauma section of the ER tonight.

expect some crazy stories.

About a month ago, a woman presented to the ER via ambulance for complaints of vaginal bleeding after having sex for the first time in over 8 months. At first, the physician and I were pretty amused by this complaint because neither of us had seen someone come in via ambulance for vaginal bleeding after sex.

As soon as we went in to examine her is when things started getting crazy. She wasn’t just bleeding, she was essentially hemorrhaging blood from her vagina. I’m not even exaggerating. There was so much blood that we couldn’t find where she was bleeding from.  

So, we call the OBGYN surgeon on call and we get no reply. We ended up paging him three other times without a response. During this time, the patient blood pressure was steadily dropping and we had to move her to a “trauma room” so we could get more room to work with her. We got some blood to give her, but before it could get there she started going into shock, becoming unresponsive and she tachycardic (she had a fast heart rate).

We were able to just keep her stabilized, 4 units of blood later, until the OBGYN surgeon showed up and whisked her off to surgery.

There are two really crazy things that happened

 1) The patient ended up having a 4 inch laceration to her vagina. I don’t even want to know what she was doing that caused a laceration that big.

2) Why did the OBGYN take so long to show up? Because while he was watching tv with his family, his daughter took his iPhone and decided to play angry birds on it and turned off the ringer on his phone.

Angry birds can kill. 

Today in the ER, a 40 something year old woman came into the ER complaining of a possible abscess on her stomach. Unfortunately, she was extremely morbidly obese, about 475 pounds, which was by far too heavy for a CT scan. So, while we were waiting for the Ultrasound tech to “scan” her abscess, we hear the woman screaming from her room “I blew up, I blew up!”. We go into the room and her abscess had RUPTURED. 

It was by far the most disgusting abscess I had ever seen. She had thick dark green drainage oozing out of her abscess and we ended up collecting over 1 liter of the drainage before the surgeon came in and decided to take her off to surgery.

The smell was the worst part of it, within 5 minutes it stank up the entire ER, which is quite large. I couldn’t even sit at the Nurse’s station at the other side of the ER without wanting to vomit, and I’m pretty sure one of the nurses actually did vomit after going in the room. The smell was that bad.