Life in the ER

I have found myself spending a lot of time in the ER lately. No, I did not pick up a new shift at the hospital, but if things keep going the way they are they might as well give me a position. Today was my second trip to the Emergency Room in about oh maybe 28 hours. Yesterday I took my roommate who believed that she had a blood clot in her leg. Don't worry she is fine but she did have legitimate reason to believe that she had a clot. That was the easy trip. We were in and out of the hospital in about 2 hours. I even got to go with her to get her ultra sound. Today was a different story though.

I was in my ice skating class and we were working on some of our choreography for our performance in April when I looked to my right and see this one girl fall backwards and land right on her wrist. She screamed out and I skated over to her. (I guess the doctor in me has already kicked in.) It was apparent that it was broken so the teacher and I got her off the ice and I promptly began to splint her wrist with whatever I could find. I did a pretty good job splinting with two pairs of socks and my polar fleece and then drove her to the Emergency Room. When we got there they took x-rays of the wrist and it was obviously broken; the whole radius was snapped and shifted over. I thought that we would be there 3 or 4 hours tops but 4 hours rolled around and we still had not seen the orthopedist. Then 5 hours and the movie Clear and Present Danger later we still had not heard from the Orthopedist. Finally after about 7 hours we heard that the doctor was on his way. The thing is we knew that they were still going to have to set the bone back in place and to do that put her under which takes even longer for the sedation to wear off before we could go home.

The doctor got there and was in the process of reducing her break when she her breathing nearly stopped. That was intense. The nurses are yelling 50…45…40 someone call respiratory and get them down here now! They finally got her breathing again and got the bone set but it was sure an adventure to get there. As we were being discharged and wheeled out of the hospital it had been a whopping 9 hours of hospital fun!

I really hope that tomorrow is a dull incident free day.