“ I swear, he wasn’t breathing!”

The other day I was working in the ER when suddenly the overhead PA system crackled to life: “Code Blue in the Special Care Unit, Code Blue!”

I abandoned my patient in mid-sentence and belted out of the department. As I passed the operating room I was joined by both our surgeon and our anaesthetist.

At the entrance to unit 4 we nearly collided with four ambulance attendants on their way to assist at the code. The seven of us thundered down the hall like a herd of stampeding rhinos.

We came crashing into the room only to find that two other doctors, a medical student, a respiratory therapist and at least half a dozen nurses had already beaten us to the punch. It was standing room only.

I wormed my way to the bedside to see how the resuscitation was progressing. To my surprise, the patient was sitting bolt upright in his bed. His eyes were as wide as saucers. He was looking fearfully at the medical student, who happened to be brandishing the defibrillator paddles. There was a nursing student with Ferrari-red cheeks at the foot of the bed.

“I swear, he wasn’t breathing!” she was telling anyone who’d listen. After a fair bit of grumbling the mob slowly began to disperse.

As we left the room I heard the anaesthetist mutter, “Code Blue? More like a Code Blue Light!”

Rollover Rob (The Adamantium Man)

Last Wednesday night the ER was flat-out ridiculous. Think TARFU. No, scratch that. More like DEFCON 1. I didn’t get home until well after two in the morning. I shed my clothing and fell asleep within seconds. Five minutes later the phone rang. It’s uncanny how often that happens.

“A-roo?” I groaned into the receiver. Wait a minute, that’s not English. “Hello?”

“Hi Dr. Gray. Sorry to wake you, but I’ve got an intoxicated 24-year-old man who was just in a rollover. He has a swollen left elbow, some contusions and several superficial lacerations.”

“Coupla minutes.”

As I fumbled around in the dark in search of my discarded scrubs I recited my well-worn motivational mantra: I love my job, I love my job, I love my job… .

When I got to the hospital I hung up my jacket and went to the ER. I must have looked even more pathetic than usual because the nurse supervisor apologized again for waking me up.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Where is he?”

She pointed to room F.

A tattoo-laden critter in a Kid Rock T-shirt, muddy black jeans and roach-killer cowboy boots was sprawled on the stretcher. He stank of booze. When he saw me he grinned widely and yelled, “HEY, BUDDY!”

“I’m not your buddy,” I growled. He looked surprised. I guess back on his home planet everyone’s cheerful at 2:45 a.m. “What’s your name?”

“Rob.”

“Okay Rob, take off everything except your underwear.”

Just then a teenage girl wearing more makeup than your average circus clown barged in and addressed my new patient.

“Hey, baby, your lighter’s not working,” she said. “Got any matches?”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Rob’s girlfriend.”

“Were you in the accident?”

“Nope.”

I jerked my thumb towards the door.

“Out.”

Bozette hightailed it out of the room. While I shut the door, Rob stripped down to his Fruit of the Looms.

As I examined him I got more of a history. The saga went something like this: Rob and his merry band of cretins had been drinking heavily all night. Sometime around 1:30 he managed to convince his sidekicks Little Klutz and Friar Schmuck to drive him to a neighbouring town so he could look up his ex-girlfriend and three-month-old son. They were doing an estimated 150 kilometres per hour when their car parted company with the highway. Not surprisingly he didn’t recollect too much about the crash itself, but he did remember kicking out the remnants of the rear windshield and crawling away from the smouldering wreckage. In order to avoid the police with all their pesky questions and breathalyzers, the gormless trio fled the scene. When Rob got back to his apartment his current girlfriend took one look at him and dragged him to the ER to get checked out.

Aside from an abundance of minor scrapes and bruises, Rob appeared to be all right. Even his nipple rings were intact. The only thing of concern was his left elbow – it was moderately swollen and he wasn’t moving it well. I asked switchboard to call the x-ray tech in. I was feeling a little guilty about the way I had summarily kicked his girlfriend out earlier, so I asked the receptionist to allow her to return so they could sit together while he waited for his films. My conscience appeased, I hunkered down at the main desk in the ER and began my charting.

As soon as his girlfriend arrived they started talking:

“You okay, baby?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“What’d the doctor say?”

“I just need a couple of x-rays, no big deal.”

“Will you need a cast?”

“Dunno.”

“What about one of those shots for, you know, that, like, lockjaw thingy?”

“Naw, I got one of those after I got my tats in jail a coupla years ago.”

“Oh, that’s good. You sure you’re okay, baby? How many times did you roll?”

“Six or seven times, max. Like I said, no big deal. I’ve been in lots of rollovers before. I just walk away from them.”

“Oooh, Robby,” she squealed, “you’re the best!”

Yep, that’s a really important trait to take into account when considering a potential mate – the ability to walk away from rollovers. You just never know when it might come in handy!

Drinking Problem

Several nights ago a 14-month-old boy with a cough was brought to our emergency department. While I obtained the history from his mother, the little fellow happily explored the room. After a couple of minutes he toddled back to her and reached for the half-full cup of Tim Hortons coffee she had been sipping from.

“Eh! Eh!” he grunted.

“Jack-Jack want coffee?” she asked.

“Eh! Eh!” he confirmed.

She handed him the cup. I watched in disbelief as he noisily slurped the rest of the java down. When he was finished he burped loudly, hucked the empty cup onto the floor and wobbled away.

“You let your 14-month-old son drink coffee?” I asked incredulously.

“Oh, Jack drinks whatever I drink,” was her reply.

Blood

At 8:30 this morning a trucker accidentally dropped a large hunting knife on his left foot. The blade pierced the skin and embedded itself deep in the bone. When he pulled it out, a miniature geyser of blood erupted. He tried to staunch the flow with some towels, but within a few seconds they were soaked. He drove his rig to our hospital and limped into the ER. The triage nurse applied a tight pressure dressing and had me paged.

By the time I arrived, the minor trauma room was saturated with the odour of blood. It washed over me in waves as I stitched up the wound. Traces of it clung to my clothes long after the patient departed.

Just as the ghostly scent of blood was beginning to fade from my memory, an industrial accident victim was brought in. He had crushed his right hand between two steel plates. Fortunately no bones were broken, but several of his fingernails had blood trapped underneath them. The nail bed hematomas were causing a lot of pain. To relieve his discomfort I drilled holes through the damaged nails with an 18-gauge needle. The smell of the draining blood gave me a weird feeling of déjà vu.

An hour later a drunken 25-year-old who had just put his fist through a plate-glass window staggered up to the receptionist’s desk. Arcs of blood sprayed from his jagged wrist laceration in perfect sync with his heartbeat. I hustled him into a treatment room and began suturing. After about a dozen stitches the bleeding reluctantly came under control.