Too emergencied

I like the emergency room. I get to do a lot of stuff, like drain abscesses. I drained two yesterday, and one was the biggest zit you will ever hear about. There must have been enough there to fill a sleeping bag.

The emergency room's also interesting. There're always pretty good patients to see, who have things that you can set right pretty quickly. Dislocated limbs, coughs, colds, etc etc. And the people you can't fix right away, (or don't want to deal with) like the psychiatric patients, you can send off to someone else who can take care of them.

The one thing I don't like about emergency is how you don't get to hear the rest of the story. Oftentimes, I find that the people I meet and treat are people I'd like to see again so I can find out how they're doing. Especially after I heard about all the stories about stupid emergency doctors missing diagnoses. Sure, we all laugh at them. Dumb doctors! How could they be so moronic? HA HA HA!

But wait... I'M probably making those same mistakes! I'll never find out though. Or rather, the only time I'll find out is when someone's lawyer comes calling. It'd be nice to know how your patients turn out so you won't develop a habit of undertreating or overtreating or improperly treating them later.

The other reason why I'd like to hear the rest of the story sometimes is because there're some patients I root for. I saw the nicest guy the other day, joking and upbeat even though he'd been waiting for hours to get his headaches looked at. He was a middle-aged guy with a family, and was just checking in to make sure his new onset headaches weren't anything serious.

I worked him up and didn't find anything unusual. His story was textbook migraines too. I reassured him that it probably wasn't anything dangerous, but a CT was ordered anyway cause he'd waited so long.

Turns out he had a huge tumor in his temporal lobe. The news wasn't easy to give, and I'm sure it was harder to take. Here was this guy coming in to see if there was anything we could do for his migraines, and now he has cancer in his head. It looked like he was overwhelmed with the pace at which things happened after that. Requistions for more CTs, more referrals, more consults, more directions to more hospitals for more appointments... suddenly his whole life changed. I bet he'd been planning to go home and hang out with the kids before work the next day. Not so anymore. Now he's in a battle for his life.

So he was referred to a neurosurgeon and we gave him what little information we could. And that was that. I'd like to meet him again to find out how he's doing, but that won't happen in the emerg.