Silly me... I thought a Sunday day shift (8am-6pm) would be slow. HA! There was only patient waiting to be seen when the attending and I started at 8, but then the board quickly filled up, and never went down. I spent the entire day feeling like I was running several patients behind, because most of the day, I was running several patients behind.
For some reason, we seemed to be giving a special deal for dental pain and knee injuries. No joke. For about an hour somewhere in the middle of the day, I only saw patients with dental pain and knee injuries (and for some reason, they seemed to alternate). When I'm talking dental pain, I'm talking about really gross teeth--cavities, infections that spread to the jaw and ear, the whole bit. So they got antibiotics, phenergan (anti emetic--keeps them from vomiting the antibiotics), and the vicodin that they probably came in for.
Knee injuries aren't fun--for the patient or the emergency room physician/med student. For the patient, they hurt, and it makes it really difficult to get around when you can't put weight on your leg. For the people trying to figure out what's going on, it's pretty difficult when your primary imaging modality is an x-ray, and your primary injuries involve things that can't be seen on x-rays. Here's an x-ray of a knee with an ACL rupture:
Yeah, it's not much different from an x-ray of someone with no injury. So we did our x-rays, saw nothing, and told them to follow up with their primary care physicians to schedule an MRI.
The shift ended with the obligatory football injury (obviously, nobody told these middle schoolers that it's Sunday). Eleven-year-old boy, tried to tackle his opponent and missed, slamming his open hand into the ground and getting a buckle fracture of his radius. They're a bit subtle on x-ray. Here's an example:
His was actually a bit more obvious than that, but it did me a minute or two of staring at the x-ray to decide that it wasn't right. He was pretty excited about getting his first broken bone.
Tomorrow is a day off (yay!), which will consist of sleeping (yay!) and listening to Podcast lectures (boo!) and doing online quizzes (boo!). Ah, the busy-work... gotta love it.
On a happier note, I have my flight and hotel for Hawaii :) I'll be flying on Sunday, Nov. 2, leaving Columbus at 8 am, and staying at the Tripler Lodge (military housing right next to the hospital) until Thanksgiving (Nov. 27), when I fly back at 4 pm, getting me back to Columbus sometime the morning of the 28th.
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