medical school, a night in the life

so, not all medical students are suture techs. its a job i applied for and about 3-4 ppl are selected each year from the med school class of 150 to do it. so, its definitely an honor. and i actually get paid.

we work 3-5 times a month down in the trauma ER. on the weekends, you work 6pm till 6am overnight and do wound care, suture ppl up, clean out bullet wounds, etc. let me tell you, in the summer, this can be wild times.

so, recently, i woke up at 5am and did my normal clerkship for about 10 hours during the day, then went for my 12 hour suture shift that night.

holy hell. it was the craziest shift ever. now, its always a trip, cause its is the county hospital, so we get a lot of the uninsured ppl, drunk ppl, arrested ppl, and its a level one trauma center, so we get the worse traumas in a three state area.

my trauma pager went off so much last night, i considered turning it off. the helicopters were doing hot offloads. that means you pulled the patient off while the blades were still running, cause two other choppers were hovering waiting to do the same. contrary to TV and movies, we normally let the blades stop before we get ppl out of the things.

i helped load multiple ppl into body bags from MVAs, i sewed up three ppl in handcuffs, i tried to explain medical procedures to two mexican doods that spoke no english (i know like 10 spanish words, miming 'lidocaine' is hard) i took one lady to CT that i was afraid was going to bleed out from her head on the scanner (while the guy running the scanner hit on me WTF?), prolly sewed up 6 head lacerations, two that went to the skull, sewed up 4 other lacerations, i did 10 complete history and physicals (H and Ps), took stitches out put in by a retarded outlying hospital that didnt know how to take care of an open fracture from a bullet wound.....................and let me tell you, that isnt even CLOSE to all of it. needless to say, i never sat down, and even there was still stuff to do when my shift ended that morning. the drive home was touch and go.

all i can say, is that i slept very well after all this, and was so happy id taken the next day off.

friday night in memphis, ppl. good lord.