Nuts!

I spent the first two weeks of November at in Harlem for my first rotation there. That place gets nuts! The first day wasn't actually too bad, as it was the day of the NYC Marathon and surprisingly, we didn't get that many patients.

However, that was the only quiet day. But even though it got hectic, most attendings took everything in stride and handled the patient load well. They've got some people who can run an ED well, and it makes such a difference. They have a sicker population, which was interesting. Did a few NG lavages which became a funny situation, as they recently got a supply of new equipment and it took ages to try to figure out how to get suction, so we're running through all different scenarios while this guy has a tube hanging out his nose.

I had an interesting patient who was perfectly lovely except for seeing demons / creatures on the walls. I actually became irritated at the attendant who kept repeating "the pt's crazy, everyone knows it, the family knows it, just crazy!" But the patient was very with it except for the seeing "evil," poor person. I hope they found a cause.

My last shift was absolutely pressing panic buttons. All was grand until about mid-morning when all of a sudden, sick patients were coming in at the same time. I was looking after a patient who I realized could be very pausibly having a brain bleed as I was interviewing him/her, and the attending at the time (who I get along well with and said some nice things about me) also had a couple sickies and as we were making plans, the CT machine went down. So then I spent about 3 hours trying to transfer them to another facility to have a CT, meanwhile checking every 5 minutes to see whether my possible brain bleed was still stable and the attending and I debating on whether we should do the LP or not without a confirmed bleed. We ended up doing the lumbar puncture with no complications, to our great relief.

And then I dashed home to hop on a plane to Dublin for the beginning of my holiday!