Unplanned

Just as we were sitting down to morning rounds to discuss our patients' treatment plans for the day, the traumas started rolling in. With five back to back, it was crazy - kind of like you see on TV, in fact. The most critical of the five was a girl in her early twenties, hit on the freeway during the morning commute. She had been extricated from her car by the FD and was unresponsive but with a pulse and breathing. All sorts of stuff was done to stabilize her cardiovascular system. Once it was stable she was taken for scans and tests, but she deteriorated again into unstable condition, so they finally decided to do an exploratory laparotomy. Basically, they sliced her open virtually from neck to pubis, a good 2-foot incision, and just started looking around for the source of bleeding. They found it - it was her spleen - and at the end of the day, she had: half her hair shaved off presumably to put a tube in her head to relieve the swelling or bleeding of her brain, a collapsed lung, a shredded spleen, 12 units of blood, a shattered pelvis, and major abdominal surgery. And no one knew who she was, so no one could contact her family.

The humane thought: I'm sure she didn't mean for this to happen when she woke up today. I hope they figure out who she is soon and call her family.

The med student insight: this must be the satisfaction of surgery, to see a patient from crash to fix, the beginning to end. But I still like being in the ER more than the OR.

The cynical side note: do not worry whether you wore clean underwear or not when you crash your car. We really don't care or look when we cut them off, and you probably will have peed or pooped in them by the time you get to us anyway.