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Notes -
The following is loosely based on true events:
Imagine you are a trauma surgeon.
You work in a small trauma center; you show up to your shift. There’s more shouting than normal in the ED, so you head to the trauma bay first.
24 hours to go.
The first thing you see is a headless body in one of the bays. “What the fuck is that Jim” you say to your colleague, who is currently administering chest compressions to a clearly very temporarily alive patient, and only such because someone is basically rhythmically punching her in the heart.
“Oh yeah, EMS didn’t want to call it so they left that there. Paperwork, you know? No idea where the head is.” He pauses. “Car accident, we think, didn’t get a great report before they ran off.” He then grunts and someone else takes over chest compressions, he walks over to lab print outs and stares at some numbers, willing them to change. They don’t. The patient gurgles for a second, everyone’s breath pauses as they hope, but then nothing else happens. You look back at the patient being coded, her chest looks like it has the consistency of spaghetti and meatballs.
You take in the scene and then ask the dreaded question “how long?” “we don’t know, she was down in the field and we’ve been doing compressions for…30 minutes?” One of the nurses’ interrupts “43.” You stare. He stares back. He then points to the pediatric trauma bay. The curtain is closed. “I didn’t want all three, you know?” You nod, then walk over to the headless body. “Time of death, whenever the fuck now is. I’ll chart later.” Someone reads off the time, someone else writes it on a post it note and puts the name of the patient on it, and then slaps it to the computer you usually use.
You briefly consider how aggravated this would make the hospital legal team when a nurse walks in from the main ED, exposing the headless body to a bunch of civilians waiting for treatment of their mild respiratory infections. She says “umm doctor, the one patient wanted to talk to you about their pain medicine. Thanks!” She then runs away before you can ask follow up questions, and you hear her saying to another nurse “OMG it’s just sitting their headless.” A patient looks ill hearing this.
“Fucking nurses” you say. “Fucking nurses” the nurses in the trauma bay reply back.
Anesthesia sighs.
The phone rings, you pick it up. It’s the OR. “Dr. Fuckmylife, how can I help you?” “We’ve got a hot gallbladder down here, and then you have emergency cases for the next 12 hours. Jim’s got the bay, can you come scrub?
You sigh.
23 hours and 45 minutes to go.
Early training is not going to help with the above shitshow.
That was amazing, and I encourage you to write up more of these and put them as a separate post!
Here's one ~ someone else wrote when we were still on Reddit a few years ago.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/u110mx/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_11_2022/i4yly8v/
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