Blip!

This post was composed last week, but I got called to a trauma before I hit send. I'm leaving for NYC to meet up with my favourite people (Banana! Dan! Sally! Randy!) and will be back in 2 weeks, ready to tell you all the gory stories of baby-catching in Scarborough!

Suddenly, it is the last week of my surgical rotation. I am hiding in the call room at 9am, wearing 3 pagers (plus my phone). This is what I have learned after a month of surgical training:

1. Always hide in the call room. If you're on the floor, nurses, case managers, dieticians & patients can see you. And then they can ask you, "Just quickly, just one thing...". This will prevent you from doing your real job.

2. Your real job is paperwork. Every single patient needs an admission note, progress notes, prescriptions, diet plans & discharge summaries. If you are not a surgical resident it will be assumed that you love paperwork. This assumption is false. But you will do it all anyways.

3. You've got to carry the trauma pager. On my first call shift, I was terrified about being first to arrive at a trauma, which would obviously result in a spectacular and immediate patient death. Now, in my last week, I am trying to carry it as much as possible. Trauma work is teamwork (yep, there are tee-shirts) and there is always someone there to stop you from killing people. Well, so far.

To quote Strictly Ballroom; "A life lived in fear is a life half-lived". And that's just not on.

4. It is possible to get sick of Tim Horton's breakfast sandwiches. I never thought it could be true, but one a day for 21 days in a row (yes, that's how much I'm working) and I have started to feel ill at the thought. I am still eating them, but now I feel a little ill as I stand in line to order the next one.

5. I am not a surgeon. I love the cutting, love the blood, love the clean & decisive management. I do not love the hours, the turnover, the death rate or the hours. I am, for better or worse, a family doc. At least until my next rotation...

Trauma Team.

On my current surgical rotation, sometimes I carry the trauma pager. That means that if a trauma arrives at the hospital, I go down to Emergency and become part of the team who deals with whatever comes through the door.

My first trauma was a young guy (15) who had fallen off the back of his friend's motorcycle. He was wearing a helmet (thank GOD!) so his major injuries were a distinct loss of skin and multiple fractures in his hands. This was a good trauma.

Yesterday we had another young patient. At 2 in the afternoon, she was crossing the street in front of her house and was hit by a car going 40kph. She was thrown through a fence and knocked unconscious at the scene. I was cutting her clothes off (to expose any hidden injuries) as they assessed her pupils; both blown. The CT scan showed a massive intra-cranial bleed. We put in a chest tube, then sent her up with the neurosurgeons to have her brain drained. I don't know for sure, but the consensus was that she would not live. This is a bad trauma.

I am loving this job; long hours melt away when you feel that you are doing valuable work. And when you are involved in these high-tension situations, every nerve comes alive and you function at a higher level than you knew possible. However.

However.

I was lying on my bed last night, reading trashy comics, when I closed my eyes. The sight of trauma 2's broken body appeared in my head. I had to call the people I love to make sure that they hadn't been hit by cars. I dreamed about the push of forcep & tube into the chest wall.

There are some drawbacks to this career path.

2 weeks till babies. Perhaps that will be less traumatic.