Accident Prone

"YOU HAVE ONE OF THE

NICEST ABDOMENS

I HAVE EVER SEEN."

I've been wondering if I really need to be "up close and personal" on this blog. However, with me trying to be truly honest, I guess I'll have to break through my "comfort barrier." I'm screaming it from the inside... but I'll go ahead and be brave and brute... admitting that I have a horrible habit...

I like to stare at ambulances. :P

I don't know... its something I picked up here in Dominica. Dominican ambulances get so much different treatment than the ambulances found in the U.S. Back in the states, as soon as an ambulance puts on its sirens and lights... everything stops and the red carpet is laid out: The cars move over. The lights turn green. The street is all theirs. However, in Dominica, while staring at ambulances, I've seen the opposite. They sometimes get passed. Cars don't move over for them. And yes, if a traffic jam occurs, its over for the ambulance to get to the hospital.

And then after all that hassle (and time), the patient makes it to the hospital, and that's where I was today :P. Today began my Accident & Emergency (A&E) rotation at Princess Margaret Hospital. A&E is the Dominican equivalent of the ER in the States (along with other lingo differences such as Operating Theatre over Operating Room). Our overseeing doctor had us playing the game of "doctor" from the beginning. We were making out prescription forms, requests for specific labs we wanted, examining the patient and taking histories at our (and okay, somewhat his accord). Think of it basically being in a serious version of Microsoft Doctor Simulator.

Have you ever watched either ER on TV or one of those cheesy disaster films (i.e. Volcano or Earthquake) where a bunch of patients were rushed to the hospital ER after an accident or disaster? Well, I gotta say, we felt a rush just like that, as people started to come in from a bus accident on the main road, and we had some pediatric patients come in with musculoskeletal and internal injuries. Our doctor just kept pushing us forward by saying, "Come on, let's go." Luckily it wasn't anything too serious today... I don't know how I would have handled my first day with the group with many patients walk in.

Today was also pretty sweet, such as learning how to deal more efficiently with getting compliance & accurate information from patients. For instance, there was a pediatric patient with a stomachache that walked in. We questioned if that was really the case... However, using both the mom and supporting the answers from the patients answers with physical exam findings, we took the chief complaint pretty darn seriously. We ended up giving a clean bill of health and declared that that patient's abdomen was "one of the nicest abdomens" we have ever seen. But still we had given some anti-parasitic mediation, just in case.

Other cool things we got to do today were draining of hematomas, pus removing from a football player's knee, and flushing a foreign object out of a bus driver's eye. However, at the end, our overseeing doctor said to us, "Today wasn't the most exciting of days." All of our cases were pretty much straight forward today. So, here's to a week of A&E... our most amazing rotation yet.

The adventures continue...

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I'd like to thank all of you who've been reading this blog. To those of you who've commented and said good things about it to me... extreme thanks for your support and feedback. You guys are my supporters (and participating) on this, my great medical adventure. If you have a prompt I should discuss on my blog, let me know. I'm always looking for something new to write about or address... prompts are fun. :P