Endless shifts and more class

Yesterday's shift was pretty much more of the same, with one interesting twist: instead of ending the shift with football injuries, that's how we started it. The night before, he was tackled and took a helmet to the chest, and had been having pain since, so he came in for an x-ray. Everything was fine, no broken bones or collapsed lungs, so we cleared him to continue playing.

That was our first case of the shift, and just like on Sunday, once they started, they didn't stop. I felt like I was several patients behind the entire day, but such is life. The attending I was working with wanted me to get some practice with procedures, so she had me starting my own IVs and such, which usually the nurses do. I also got to staple an 11-year-old kid's head, which was all sorts of fun. We gave him a little something to take the edge off first, so he was actually pretty still the entire time.

Today was a class day (ugh), which started with two hours of discussing ER cases. After that we had an hour of simulation, going over management of acute emergency patients with the clinical skills lab's computerized dummy. The first one ended up coding (respiratory arrest), because the student running the case kept asking the patient questions instead of noticing that the patient's (dummy's, whatever) vital signs were crashing. Fortunately, he had the rest of us backing him up, so we were able to do CPR and treat him and bring him back to life. I got in an argument with my fellow students, and the ER resident running the cases, when I said that we can give the patient O+ blood instead of O-, because studies have shown that while giving a woman with O- blood of childbearing age O+ blood can cause problems in any subsequent pregnancy, men obviously don't have the same problem. Well, the resident said he had never heard of that. When we went over the case afterwards, the attending said that I was right, and in times where you might have to conserve your supply of O-, men should receive O+ blood to save the O- blood for women. So, I was right, and they were wrong, and I was very proud of myself for that.

Anyway, after that I had to take my car to the VW dealership for its 5000 mile maintenance. I still can't believe I've put that many miles on it.