I liked ER until I got to medical school and realised that the emergency department is mostly calm AF. People efficiently deal with your spurting blood vessel without dramatic, percussion music. Not a single person sitting astride a trolley delivering CPR as the ambulance crew wheel into the OR.
That's been my experience.
What?? No bed-bound folk in the hallways?? No fights in the lobby?? No one’s fucking in the janitorial closets???
I’m incredibly relieved to hear it!
IDK. I've been in crazy ERs where the police chased people through the building; when it was so packed I had to lay on the floor under my walker, in my own filth, for 12 hours, while a person OD'd & died right there. They talked about air lifting me to the next state, they were so stretched thin
Oh, I've had general craziness from time to time, and there's always That Day when everything goes weird. I've been threatened with death, punched, stabbed, etc. But most of the time it's calm efficiency. But I'm not talking about the US, so maybe it's different.
Stabbed? YIKES glad you are ok yeah I think the US is different. Ppl who don't have healthcare go to the ER for different reasons than if they have access to a doc. Most ppl wait until the last minute since they can't afford it, making outcomes more dire it's a messed up system here, badly
Yeah, right in the back, many years ago. Luckily, I was in the right place to be stabbed.
Damn. I’m sorry. How completely awful. But yes if it had to happen somewhere, much better to be in a room full of trained HCW’s! Sorry you had to go thru that and thank you for your service to the public. We all owe you and all such great debt
Times I’ve been in the ER in the US, it’s usually messy chaos among the patients, but the staff seemed mostly bored or irritable/stressed/harassed
Doctor buddy says this. He and his partner did meet over an ER show like emergency where she was the anesthesia consult & the surgical one was stuck in OR so she had to do some emergency neck surgery to fix a blood vessel. Says it was the hottest thing he’d ever seen. Doctors be odd thought I.
Not a doctor, and not disputing doctors being weird...but I think I would also find it hot if my (equally non-doctor) spouse successfully performed emergency surgery on someone.
(Or maybe I'm just a fan of my spouse.)
I agree with your assessment.
He works in a cardiac surgical unit and assures me they do get to do chest and internal heart compressions on a gurney occasionally if something goes wrong. I do wonder if they sometimes prefer when it does 🙄
Yes, but do they sit astride the gurney saying, 'don't you die on me!' while drums play?
. o O ( They can afford *drums*?! )
He did tell me he once used those words. No drums though. But sounds like that’s once in 30 years so hardly dramatic :)
I tend to think anyone who isn't chill under stress must crash out of a job like that early. Thinking back, two of the calmer people I've worked around were a registered nurse ER specialist who did helicopter ambulance shifts, and a former army medic with a hitch in Afghanistan.
and the waiting rooms are often quite sleepy spaces- often because of our wait times. The most aggro I ever had was a film crew wanting to put me on that 24 hour emergency tv programme. Was just v disappointed they were not doctor and went back to sleep.
What!! This sounds fake tbh.
On the other hand, I did see a famous person arrive dead, but described in the dailies as 'died in hospital after he could not be resuscitated'. Absolute bollocks. Body was cold, pupils fixed and dilated. But of course we couldn't talk about it.
Your valiant efforts were appreciated, though.
Most excitement I saw in an ER was when I brought in my roommate with a cracked head. But that’s because he was the guy who delivered pizzas there regularly so they were all “it’s the pizza guy!” and scrambled to help him fast as anything.
The pizza guy is extremely important! Night shifts have a whole different economy and food delivery is an important part.
And this was in the 90s, where the entire late night food delivery ecosystem was radically different. He had a whole system of getting pizzas at cost and then taking them to ERs, bars, hotel front desks, etc. in the middle of the night.
It is honestly one of the most boring departments. Mostly lots of waiting.
Now ICUs during a Code Blue, that is more like TV excitement.
things you did not want to know
I think about this a lot. So much adrenaline, so much drama. Good tv for the couch potatoes, but those doctors would burn out in a few weeks!
The accounts department though... blood everywhere...
way to take the fun out of it, tade. geez (actually, that’s a very good thing. i know i don’t want someone who is freaking the fuck out elbow deep in my chest cavity. i’d prefer someone who makes the best decisions & isn’t having coworker drama bc fucking the nurse in the supply closet.)
A lot of what you have to do is drilled into you so many times, that you can be paged, wake from a deep sleep, and do it. And, from the perspective of the patient, it's an unusual occurrence, whereas to the health professionals, it's just Tuesday.
[nods] still, it must be stressful. it certainly sounds like it. just grateful/thankful that there are talented, professional, doctor-humans willing to endure all that and are capable of doing it well. hats off, sir.
I once dated an ER doctor and to my utter shock I discovered that nobody on ER ward was fucking anyone else on ER ward during coffee break
Medical dramas lie constantly. I once wrote to the BBC about their show 'Doctors' about something that would NEVER happen, and they straight-up said, it's for dramatic effect and not based in reality.
and yet people who aren't familiar with the background will think that's how things work! there's fictionalizing and then there's lying
The one I complained about was a doctor physically shaking a woman with DID, telling her to snap out of it. Like, literally, laying hands on the woman.
The fuck?
That’s horrifying!
Yep.
Shades of depraved negligence in that writing, honestly
It was over a decade before 'Me Too', and the understanding in the media of consent (and even DID) was less sophisticated.
for fuck's sake
I was shocked they broadcast it. And the episode coded his actions as good.
This is how I feel about the idea baristas can spit into a problem customer’s drink. You need to be the Invisible Man.
Right?
I always joked to my coworkers is that the biggest trick we could play on them is letting them pay full-price. I will say that I worked in a large Brighton hotel and in my eight years, I did live all but one episode of Fawlty Towers… sadly I was never asked to help hide a corpse.
One of the earliest fandom interactions I had was in the late 1990s with a young doctor, who said pretty much this.
That sounds like a problem with reality 😃