Todd is currently on the ortho spine service. He has been on call the last 6 days in a row. It's been a bittersweet 6 days. Although he is allowed to stay home during the call time, he may still have to go into the hospital a few times a night. Most of the time he is able to handle the situations from home over the phone. Lucky for me I get to hear most of the phone conversation.
It generally goes somethings like this:
"So and so was injured in a ATV/auto accident and has an incomplete spinal cord injury from C or T or L spine on. There is or is not nerve damage or there is, they have weakness from here to here and then blah, blah, blah."
By this point my stomach is in knots and I'm wondering if spending the night with a garbage can next to the bed is my safest bet. Generally, I can handle most medical jargon and descriptions even if it is over the dinner table. However, there are a few things I just can not stomach! One of them is a discussion about spinal cord injuries and the other is dealing with a patient who has staples in his or her head. (Oh, and of course, my famous post about practically passing out on mother's day into a surgeon's sterile field.)
You can give me a patient with all kinds of nasty drains and tubes or intestines hanging out and I'm totally fine. There is just something about the spinal cord that makes me feel unbelievably nauseous. Perhaps it is because it is such a vital part of the body. You screw it up and your life is forever altered. Now the hole staples in the head I think is quite self explanitory.
When I get a patient at work with staples in their head I really have to focus to keep it together. I have even gone as far as to ask the neighboring nurse to tell me if there was any reason for concern with my patient with staples in his head when I was pregnant. I knew that if I had had to look at it there would have been dier consequences.
So, you can only imagine the waves of nausea I have experienced over the last month and a half and more specifically the last 6 days!
1 comment:
nausea....yeah, I knew there was a reason I didn't go into the medical field.
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