Summer Crushes

Today was a bad day for kids to be playing at the playground. We had two patients with broken bones as a result of playing on the "merry-go-round." You know, that big silver wheel with the bars that you spin around and around until you get your friends deliriously dizzy, and then they try to stand and fall over? When I was a YMCA camp counselor, we used to see how many we kids we could spin off. Total carnage today: a broken forearm and a broken leg.

Today was a bad day to be under the age of 18 and pregnant. We had about 4 patients come in with threatened miscarriages. Interestingly, two of them had taken the "morning after" pill after "the accident" and had still turned out to be pregnant. All of them will have to come back in a couple of days to confirm that they miscarried and to make sure they don't need any further procedures.

Today was a bad day to be the surgery resident. I think I counted about a dozen patients with abscesses that came in today. That has always been one of my favorite procedures, opening up an abscess and draining it; then packing it and having the patient come in and have the dressings changed every couple of days. I liked to watch the wound gradually heal, and the patient improve greatly. Now, I have to call a surgery consult for those patients, mostly because we are usually too busy to allow an ED resident to get away for a procedure like that. So I miss that satisfaction.

Today was a bad day to fall on your head. Patient One was sitting on a car with some other kids when the owner decided to back out of the driveway and then stop quickly. She fell on her head. Got away with a minor concussion. Patient Two took a backward header off the front porch. Depressed skull fracture that got taken IMMEDIATELY to the OR by neurosurgery to evacuate a growing hematoma (blood clot.) Patient Three has ADHD. A week or so ago, he had an accident off an ATV and also had a depressed skull fracture with a brain bleed. He was taken to the OR by neurosurgery, spent a couple of days at the hospital, and then got discharged home. Today he decided to try jumping off the porch, or something like that, and landed right on his surgical site giving himself a whole different kind of head bleed that, too, required IMMEDIATE transport to the OR.

Well, those are the major highlights of the day. I have something fun planned for the morning that I will write about tomorrow. Then I go back to the E.D. for the 1 - 11 p.m. shift.

On the veggie front: cereal with soy milk, coffee with a touch of milk, lunch was a grilled cheese sandwich with veggie chips and some fruit, dinner was a veggie brand feta cheese and spinach Hot Pocket of sorts and some of the great grapes and cherries I bought yesterday. It's funny, you would think there would be a lot of healthy things in a hospital cafeteria... not so much. I do have to admit, I was seriously tempted by the BBQ chicken wings they were serving, but I reached down below for the grilled cheese... 27 more days to go.