Sunday, February 12, 2006

Life in the ER

Just a quick update, because I really don't have much time for more - I'm doing a rotation in the ER at St. Bernard, located in the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Englewood in the south side of Chicago. Doing the night shifts right now and seen a lot of your typical ER stuff - chest pain, people with bumps/bruises needing stitches, intoxicated people (cocaine, alcohol and heroin are pretty common here), diabetics with poorly controlled blood sugar (things like DKA) and women with ob/gyn issues (a real gardnerella variety of infections--a bad pun for the medical types). You also see people come in with strokes, heart attacks. We've had one person arrive dead-on-arrival, and the cause was uncertain. There have been a bunch of times we've needed to intubate people because of respiratory distress or they were poorly arousable...

It's not a level 1 center, so we don't see any trauma, that gets sent mostly to Christ...

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