Chief Complaint

I just finished my first night shift this month and am having trouble sleeping so I thought I'd say a word or two about E.R. Really, E.R. boils down to those two words - Chief Complaint. You are responsible for finding out why the patient is at the hospital and then figuring out if said chief complaint is worthy of hospital admission or worthy of a trip back home.

One of the coolest features of the EMR (electronic medical records for you lay-people) software our ER uses is that you can pull up a list of all the people in rooms, in waiting, and inbound and it tells you their name, location, how long they've been waiting or roomed, and what their chief complaint is. This is the absolute funnest tool in the ER. By far. Because if you happen to have a short break in the action, you can log on and see who's coming and why. I guess the other super cool part about it is that the people in triage are instructed to list the chief complaint exactly in the patients' own words and not to translate it into medical terminology.

So, from two nights worth of working, here's a short sampling of what came through.

• I broke a window and am bleeding - (Pretty accurate assessment I thought. I put 25 stitches in that person's arm. 24 beers + nagging spouse + glass = disaster waiting to happen)
• My parts are huge - (to clarify, those were man parts he referred to, and indeed they were perhaps the largest man parts I have ever seen.)
• bicycle in foot - (this was actually EMS's words since it was a small child who was crying. She really did have a bicycle impaled through her foot.)
• I chainsawed my leg - (disappointed I didn't get to meet this one)
• broken skull s/p jumping from moving vehicle - (this one was cheating too since the chief complaint actually came from doctors at another hospital. S/P means "status post" and is doctor-ese for "after".)
• broke my arms - (Yup. We didn't do much diagnosing past that one)
• woman problems - (enough said)
• f%$# you - (this guy wasn't too happy with being at the ER. He also said that was his wife's name. And his name. And his address. I guess that makes it all easy to remember)

Anyway, on a totally seperate note, I just wanted to give a nod to a not so average family for mentioning me in their blog. Sitemeter tells me that in the past 3 days I've doubled in traffic from people linking in from their page. Despite one of their members leaving deceptive comments on one of my posts.