Estoy traumatizada.

Life at Bridgeport as a 2nd year surgery resident

That 6am early morning trauma.  It starts the whole day off 5 steps behind, and you spend that subsequent day trying to catch up. Never really succeeding, and you therefore find yourself so anxiously awaiting the minutes to tick 6pm just so you can finally stop receiving work to do and get about actually doing work. And then at 5:54pm your pager goes off yet again.  I mean you started the day with a trauma... might as well finish the same right?!

You do finally make it out of the hospital that night.  All of your patients packaged up. Bow's even tied on top. You sit down in your room and realize the interns are already asleep in their rooms upstairs. You used to try to go to bed reasonably too... habit long lost.

Trauma activations at St. Vincent's are so annoying. Take today for example. Old man had been bending over to pull a weed, and then just kept going forward right on his noggin. His daughter drove him to the hospital.  He walked into the hospital where they sat him in a wheelchair.  And then they learned he takes Coumadin at home. Automatic trauma activation!!! The alert goes out!!.  That's not the bad part.  You want to activate a trauma fine...  but then actually activate it.  It's hard to explain, but for example, just like law is "innocent until proven guilty," trauma is "everything is broken until proven otherwise." A trauma needs to be flat, in a c collar and systematically checked head to toe. It's quick and it assures nothing is missed.  But no, not at St. Vincent's.  This guy, now officially a trauma activation,  stands up from his wheelchair to get on the ED stretcher himself, he has no spine protection whatsoever. Or another horrible example: I get a trauma activation and respond to the appropriate trauma bay...it's empty.  I see a guy outside the trauma bay sitting upright in a stretcher with a poor attempt at a c collar.  Perhaps he's the trauma patient I think, but there's no nurse around, no XRay, not even an ED doc. And sure enough they finally role that patient into the trauma bay. But it's just the EMS guys and myself. I was so flabbergasted at the lack of responsibility being exhibited by the ED that the trauma patient looked up at me and asked what was wrong, why I looked so confused?! Whoops, cue the quick recovery.

If you activate a trauma.  Own the activation!

This unfortunately is not something that I foresee happening in the near future of St. V's.  Or distant future for that matter. Sigh. C'est la vie.

Sigh. I just want to go operate.

Much Love.