Real Stories From the ER
Fact and fiction in the hospital’s emergency room.
America loves a good emergency-room drama on television. Just give us a few good-looking doctors and some romantic tension, plus a patient with a gardening tool stuck in his abdomen, and we are glued to the tube.
While the soap-opera plots and workplace flirtations help jack up the ratings, no viewer can deny a fascination with that patient in Exam Room 2. You know, the guy whose foot has gone missing, or the terrified pregnant immigrant explosion victim, or the amorous couple who literally can’t be parted. We’re at once repulsed and riveted by the horrors and medical mysteries that swing through the doors of TV’s waiting rooms.
Talk to a real emergency-room physician, however, and you’ll learn that reality trumps fiction every time.
Gut-wrenching realities
Strange and incredible scenarios greet the ER staff in hospitals across the country. Dr. Alasdair Conn, chief of emergency services at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, recalls a case from early in his career. When one very drunk driver couldn’t find the exit of a gated parking lot, he rammed the fence with his car.
“He ran straight into a metal post, and the pipe went through his belly button and out of his back, impaling him on the car seat. Help was dispatched by helicopter, but they didn’t want to pull him—a bit like a shish kebab—off the chair. So they cut off the tube in front of him and behind the chair. He arrived at the hospital completely conscious, still sitting in the car seat and still drunk. I remember looking at him and thinking, “This is absolutely crazy. He has big piece of metal sticking through him and he’s speaking to me, saying, ‘Get me off this chair!’”
Incredibly, the pipe missed the man’s spine, bowel and vital organs, and he recovered with only a nick to his liver.
If the whole scene sounds very much like a scene from TV, don’t be surprised to learn that the shows routinely draw on actual cases. Some ER physicians will even submit interesting case histories to television producers seeking material.
In other instances, real ER scenarios are loaded with all of the complexities—fatal wounds, psychosis, moral ambiguity—of an entire plot. Conn recounts one of several true stories in which both the victim and the perpetrator of a crime have been in his emergency ward at the same time.
“A psychiatrist here at Mass General was assaulted with a knife by a patient. An off-duty police officer who was carrying a weapon heard the screams, went in and saw the patient stabbing the psychiatrist multiple times. The officer warned the alleged perpetrator to drop his weapon but he continued to stab the psychiatrist, so the officer shot him.”
The staff made every attempt to resuscitate the assailant, but he died of his injuries. “It can be difficult to maintain professional composure and courtesy,” Conn says, “but you have to treat everyone and deliver the care a normal patient receives.” The psychiatrist went into emergency surgery and survived.
I have been an ER nurse for 24 years and would like make a few points few people seem to realize when visiting an ER.
1. Check your attitude first-most nurses become nurses to help people, however when you act unreasonable or make unreasonable demands the facts of life will be explained to you in terms you can understand.
2. An ER is designed to treat and stabilize acute problems, dont expect the staff to be sympathetic about a problem that you have had for over a week.
3. We are not responsible for the lack of treatment you received somewhere else, or your inability to afford a primary doctor, or in a lot of cases inabilty to administer over-the-counter medications.
4. Dont tell a nurse how a nurse should act unless you're a nurse. The ER has to follow specific guidelines whether you agree with them or not. We cannot change medical practice to suit your immediate needs, doesn't mean we don't care.
5. Just because you call an ambulance doesnt mean you will be seen faster. And flopping on the floor when registering will not get you seen faster if you are breathing.
6. Understand that the ER staff IS WORKING! We dont sit around eating donuts deciding when to see the next patient, we are doing the best we can. If a nurse hasnt been in your room for over an hour it most likely that they are in 3 or 4 other rooms.
7. If you are unsatisfied with your care or treatment, don't try to change the system, or tell the nurse about it, just don't come back.
8. The fact that you are drunk or that your mother didnt give you enough attention as a child will require more than an ER visit to fix. Consider other options.
9. We have heard every drug seeking excuse out there, don't feel like your story as a drug seeker is something that we haven't heard 20 times before.
10. Sometimes it takes asking a lot of questions to get at the specific cause of your illness or injury. If you are in too much pain or too sick to assist us in helping you perhaps you should not have waited so long to seek treatment.
to the nurses in the e.r. across the world i applaud
you!to mercy san juan in sacramento ca, i double applaud you!to the trauma unit that saved my life(i know it was gods will) i tripple applaud you!{please read my memoir at blurb.com "serendipity"memoirs fromthe fithh floor)on october 15th i was in a near fatal car accident.the seatbelt ripped my diaphraghm and damaged my intestines and fractured my lower back.i was put in a induced coma for seven days.i lost my large intestine and half my small intestine and i awoken to tubes down my throat,up my nose and in my chest, my wrist were strapped to the bed.i was in the trauma unit for a few weeks before they moved me upstairs.i went in the hospital oct.15 and got out dec.15. i was there for two months, i had the best care any patient could have. the nurses treated me like a human being not just a patient.today my life is filled with doctors appt. nurse visits,blood infections and emergency rooms.i am on T.P.N. a form of nutrition pumped through a line in my chest for 16 hrs a day.i am waiting a intestine transplant,once again i will be in the hospitalized.i pray i get at least half the great care i recieved at mercy san juan!NURSES YOU WILL TRULY BE REWARDED IN HEAVEN FOR WHAT YOU DO!BLURB.COM/"SERENDIPITY"MEMOIRS FROM THE FITH FLOOR. MISTAMALIK@HOTMAIL.COM
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