It's always amazing to me how quickly things can change. In a single moment things can go from calm to chaotic and people's lives are changed forever.
I had been working the day shift in the ED, and I had three patients I was following that were just waiting for some results so that I could send them home. The ED was busy, but there were enough residents and PA's to cover them all and not be overwhelmed. Then everything changed.
I was standing at the board waiting for one of my patients to come back from getting a chest x-ray when my senior rushed past me and said we were getting five accident victims from a multi-car vehicle collision (note, they are MVC's (motor vehicle collisions) not MVA's (motor vehicle accidents) since in the ED we don't believe that anything is an accident, it's always someone's fault).
I grabbed some gloves and got to the first trauma room as the EMT's were bringing in the first stretcher. We started to assess that patient when another set of EMT's were wheeling past the door with another stretcher calling out that the patient was not responding. Suddenly, everyone rushed into that room, and I was left alone assessing the patient I had. I was examining my patient when another patient was brought into the ED, and I was told to pack my patient up and move to another room.
So I disconnected all the monitors and grabbed my patient's bed and wheeled him to another room. The other patient was quickly put into the trauma room, and promptly needed a breathing tube. My patient ended up needing basically a CT scan from his head to his knees and plain x-ray films of everything in between.
Once I had finally finished a complete evaluation, about an hour later, I was able to get back to my three waiting patients and try to get them discharged. When I left at the end of my shift, my patient from the MVC was still waiting to get his CT scan. I'll find out tomorrow what it found.
He was driving along. Probably on his way home since this was late afternoon. The patient who took his place in the trauma room was high on something, leading the police on a high speed chase. One of the cars involved in the chase hit my patient and his passenger who ended up intubated and rushed to the operating room. We'll see if they even survive.
Two other, less serious patients were brought in from the same chain of accidents. One was being discharged as we were leaving. I don't know anything about the other one.
A moment in time when someone decided to run, someone decided to chase, and someone got caught in the middle. And, all ended up in our ED.
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