Speaking of my nursing career … I work in the Emergency department of a community hospital. I’m awfully lucky since the hospital is only three blocks from my home. I can actually walk to work! How great is that?
Now, I’ve been off work for a while due to my illness but I think about my job a lot and I still keep in touch with the nurses in my department. They tell me about some of the strange cases they’ve seen come in or how crazy it got in the department during the last full moon. (yes its true – there is a full moon effect, ask any emergency service worker!)
One of the saddest cases that I remember is someone who was brought in by the police. It was a girl who’d been dieting using Ephedra but she was over-dieting .. basically not eating. She was just skin and bones. On top of that she also liked to dabble in drugs … well the combination of starving herself, using diet stimulants and the drugs that she’d taken caused a severe reaction.
She was in bad shape! I was actually surprised that the police didn’t call the EMS to bring her in when they found her. Anyway, I spent most of that night taking care of her and worrying over her. She pulled through but it’s just mind boggling what people do to themselves.
I don’t have an end story for her. Unfortunately that’s the way it is in the ER. We do what we can to help people and often they are still very ill when they leave the department to go to surgery or to a floor for further care. Unless we specifically follow up on the person – and who has time in the ER, especially if the patient is no longer your patient, you just never know if they got better or what happened.
Anyone else an ER nurse?
