Overheard on a Night Shift...
Although we're not a trauma centre, we do get the occasional 'Homie
Drop-Off'. This leads to exciting nights when someone's 'homies'
decide to leave their injured buddy on the steps of our emergency
department. Last week, we got a gunshot wound to the abdomen. It was a
fairly small bullet, a .22 by the looks of it on x-ray, that
ricocheted off his iliac crest, perforated his bowel and came to rest
sungly against the opposite iliac crest. Small entrance wound, no exit
wound.
Young, panicked thug lying on the gurney: "What's wrong with me doc?"
Staff Doc: "You got shot."
Thug: "What? Like, with a real bullet?"
Staff: "Yup."
Thug: "So how come I'm not dead?"
Staff: "Um... cause this isn't TV."
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Night shift is when you see the most interesting cases. As we're also
the emergency psychiatry resource for the area, many of our
interesting cases come in the form of overdoses and acutely psychotic
patients. One that particuarly stands out was the 26-year-old 225lb
man who came in dressed in a pink bunny suit waving a magic wand.
Which would have been far more amusing had he actually been delusional
and not a sexual predator of young children. Just in case you thought
my job was ALL fun and games.
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Night shift is bad for the size of my ass. For some reason, the night
shift means food. And lots of it. In the middle of the emergency room
there is an island with a computer on it, used mostly for leaning on
when things get slow. On a recent night shift, that island held 4
large bags of chips, one container of french onion chip dip, a giant
caramel cheesecake that one nurse had made as a thank you to another,
a large box of Timbits and a bag of chocolate-peanut-butter balls.
It made the cut up veggies I had brought to snack on look pretty
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