Urology AI

So I'm halfway through my urology AI at my home institution. I've gotta say, I'm pretty freaking tired, but I'm having a good time. I'm finally getting used to the hours again after being on Psych for my last rotation. The bitch about surgery/medicine/etc is the transition period. There is a period of about 1-2 weeks where you need to get used to not sleeping/eating/shitting when you want to. Basically, during that time, you think about wanting to sleep for almost every second that you're awake. After you get through that and your body finally accepts that it's going to be tired and hungry all the time, things start getting interesting again.

Yesterday I saw my first real code. A 20 year old cholo looking kid was in the passenger's seat when his car got T-boned on the passenger's side. The kid didn't look too hot when he rolled into the ER. Urology was called because his pelvic bone was fractured and it had ruptured his bladder. This guy was bleeding out 5 liters of blood roughly every 10 minutes. The trauma team threw fluids and blood at him as they worked to figure out where the bleeding was come from. Once the trauma team thought they had him stabilized, urology stepped in to stitch up the bladder temporarily so that the other teams could finish stabilizing him.

It really was like a scrubs moment. The chief resident, 2nd year resident and I were chilling in the recovery room eating cheez-its when the kid crashed on us mid-snack. It was the kind of thing you see on TV. Chest compressions, mad fluids and the grand finale of us ripping open his chest, only to find that he had no blood in his heart and aorta. Flat line. Time of death, 16:15. Some of the nurses were crying. Others chose to tell jokes. Whatever it takes to get through the day. We all wanted to get the fuck out of there. The whole day, all we could think of was this kid who coded on us. There really was no time to decompress. We had to put on our smiles, tell our other patients how well they were doing, discharge other patients, hunt down nurses to get tests ordered and call up family members of our other patients to keep track of how they were doing. We all walked away feeling a little numb that day.

Rest in peace John Doe.

-bender