Just a little moaning

Well, no more moonlighting for me for awhile. I'm about to start a couple months of trauma--a couple months of real work like the rest of you have been doing. Last night's trauma resident had 16 new patients besides the several floor calls. His pager wasn't working, and I swear every 5 minutes I heard him paged overhead. I don't mind the consults/new patients, but I'm kind of stuck in the whole ER mindset and would rather not deal with patients after fixing the initial problem--not a huge fan of rounding, dealing with floor crises, etc. Nothing like being in the middle of one intubation in the ER and hearing your name called stat to the floor for "code blue" for a crashing floor patient. Or there's the middle-of-the-night calls for crazy nakeds needing Haldol or suddenly-unresponsives needing intubated and transferred to ICU (the problem with that one was that we transferred to the neurosurgery ICU, and the neurosurgery intensivist was, well, me--no seniors, attending a million miles away and not answering his phone. I wonder if that's why most places don't let first years moonlight? Luckily, the patient ended up doing all right after a 9-day intubated stay in the ICU.).

Quickly, in other news, last Tuesday I placed an IO at the tibial plateau, did a DPL, performed a pericardiocentesis, did a needle decompression thoracotomy, placed a chest tube, did an open thoracotomy with heart massage, inserted a foley catheter into a hole in the heart and inflated the foley balloon and applied pressure to stop the blood flow from the hole in the heart, did a cricothyroidotomy, and did a lateral canthotomy. Unfortunately, after all of that, the anesthetized pig did not survive. I think it was the high-dose potassium chloride injection that threw the heart into v-fib that finally did the old gal in. We have pig labs every 2 weeks to practice these procedures (only a couple residents at a time). We have to do like 9 during our 3 years here. It was actually very helpful.