Life Lessons

So by popular demand*, or rather at least one person's demand, now at the end of my ER rotation I have more to blog about my actual ER rotation.

I'm sure everyone reading this has seen that awesomely cheesey poster that lists like a million things that you learn in kindergarten that make you a wonderful person. Well, this month in the ER I've compiled a similar list that will help make you a healthy person. At least as healthy as luck and/or stupidity will permit.

• Don't wear flip flops while mowing the lawn. Don't put your hand under a stalled lawn mower that is still turned on. Don't try to take a riding lawn mower out of the back of a pick-up truck all by yourself. All are really good ways to lose body parts. If you know the neumonic - it's usually a body part that you wouldn't use lidocaine with epinephrine on that you lose. If you don't know the neumonic, well, I'm not going to post it here because while I do like the attention from random google searches, that's not the attention I want.
• Don't cuss out homeless men with knives who ask you for money. They might stab you. A couple times.
• Don't zip your pants up too fast without looking to see what's still in the zipper. I didn't think that this actually happened, but as I discovered this month, it does. And it looks very painful.
• Don't lie to the doctor about what happened to you. For example, don't tell the doctors at 2 different hospitals that you fell off a swing if you actually were bitten by a cottonmouth snake. Some of them might believe you and your treatment might get delayed 6 hours and you might risk loosing body parts.
• Don't punch glass windows. Don't jump through glass windows. Don't lean all your body weight on glass windows. Don't push really hard on glass windows. Glass breaks. Broken glass is sharp. It will cut you. Deep. There will be blood. Lots of it.
• Don't insert objects PR. P stands for "per". R stands for a word that starts with R and sounds like "wrecked 'um". It might just disappear on you. And that's a really embarrassing story to have to tell the doctor.
• Don't think that you are too good for eye protection. Especially if you are breaking up concrete (it might just end up inside your eye) or working with methyl chlorobenzene (it might just burn your corneas right off).
• Don't think that vizine eye drops is all you need if you get methyl chlorobenzene in your eyes. And don't wait 2 days to go to the hospital.
• Don't do drugs. Especially fry (marijuana dipped in embalming fluid). It will make you crazy. Irreversible-forever-for-the-rest-of-your-life crazy.
• Don't think you no longer need your psychiatric anti-psychotic meds. You will go psychotic if you stop them.
• Don't think you don't need a seatbelt. Unless you are curious what it's like to break a steering wheel in half with your chest or go through the windshield.
• Don't put your feet over the passenger air bag. It will come out very fast and it will hurt you very badly.
• Don't accept unscreened blood transfusions from Mexico.
• Don't beat your child to death. The police are pretty good at figuring that one out.
• Don't let your kid ride a broken bicycle outside after 11 PM. It might just be asking for disaster.
• Don't come into an ER and ask for a pain medicine by name and dose. You won't get it, or much of anything else after that.
• Don't stop coumadin all of a sudden because you think it's not doing anything. If you had a stroke before and they put you on coumadin, it's pretty likely that you'll have another if you stop the coumadin.
• Don't get 20 tattoos and then be a cry baby about getting stitches. Or about getting shot by your father-in-law with a shotgun.
• Don't change your tire on a too-narrow shoulder of a busy 6 lane freeway. Unless you want to get hit by a car.
• Don't jaywalk and think you can beat any car. You can't. And cars weigh roughly 10 times what you do. And don't break as easily.
• Don't shoot at the police. They shoot back.
• Don't eat like an American.
• Don't think that you don't need pre-natal care. You do.
• Don't think that if the doctor told you to be on bedrest that this means don't go to work, but spend all day out and around town doing a million things.
• Don't bring all your personal belongings to the ER with you in a cardboard box. And then drop it all over the trauma bay as they are taking you out to a bed.
• Don't come to the ER and say you have a spider bite unless you saw an actual spider on you and saw and felt it actually bite you.
• Don't eat batteries.
• Don't come to the ER in a busy academic hospital unless you want some random medical student to anonymously blog about your stupidity.

So there you have it. Real convential wisdom for your bathroom wall.

*I say this is by popular demand, but I have no actual way of confirming this since apparently the popular demand all read this site previously via an RSS aggregator and never actually came and visited my site nor did they artificially inflate my self importance by raising my site visits counted by sitemeter.