my new home

Today is Tuesday, 5pm. Since Sunday I have spent 45 hours at the hospital. This is somewhat absurd. Please direct all mail to my new home at Parkland Memorial Hospital ER, Trauma Hall.

My last call was Sunday before Labor Day... trauma call is always worse on weekends or holidays when people are out drinking, boating, firing guns, etc. This ended up being 33 straight hours of being awake and running around, barely sitting down for 20 min to eat dinner. It drove me beyond the point of utter exhaustion and took everything out of me physically and mentally. It's so surreal... your entire body and head hurt, you can barely see or think straight, and you hope the adrenaline of life-and-death will get you through the night. Two Level I traumas were pronounced on the spot late in the night; by that point I just felt empty, emotionless, and numb to the smells of blood and sweat and death. After the patient was pronounced and the time called out, we all robotically returned to our work - peeling off bloody gowns and masks, returning to paperwork, and dreading the sound of our pagers going off signaling the next case on its way to our ER.

By the time a drunk, psychotic, frighteningly combative patient rolled in at 3am - physically restrained by 5 policemen on capital felony charges - I was shocked by how weary and unemotional I felt. This guy was seriously scary: he was foaming at the mouth, eyes rolling back in his head, bleeding profusely and flinging blood everywhere, spitting, reeking of urine and vomit, speech barely intelligible, cursing and lashing out at anyone nearby, violently jerking at his handcuff restraints. Even now the thought of him scares me, but I guess the weariness took over at the time; I just yelled at him to lay down and hold still while I dressed his gunshot wounds. One of his policemen pulled me aside later in wonder to comment how much it looked like I totally had my shit together. Yeah right. More like I was too tired and my brain too slow to be scared. When I finally went home at 1pm the next day, laying down and feeling the blood rush back into my legs was literally orgasmic.

Is this what the culture of medicine does to us? Belittles weakness and demands superhuman concentration after over 30 hours of being awake? Makes us feel indifferent to human suffering and death? People dying right in front of us, their relatives screaming in agony, patients in excruciating pain, and we're too tired to care? I don't want to become callous by disconnecting mentally, but at some point it's the only way to get through the night.