Word of the Day:

Today's word is crackacardia (pron. "crak-uh-car-dee-yah").

Definition: condition often seen in a patient protesting, "I ain't no crack ho...I don't do no crack........I'm doing a lot betta....just one little rock today."

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I'm totally kidding. No such word. This is just something one of the Grady trauma fellows coined that I thought was great. In reality, cocaine (in our area, most often taken in the form of crack, which is just cocaine cut with baking powder) stimulates your sympathetic nervous system, which makes your heart beat fast, which is called tachycardia. For those of you who always wanted to know all about crack, here is some info I found on (where else?) Google:

"Crack" is the street name given to cocaine that has been processed from cocaine hydrochloride to a ready-to-use free base for smoking. Rather than requiring the more volatile method of processing cocaine using ether, crack cocaine is processed with ammonia or sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) and water and heated to remove the hydrochloride, thus producing a form of cocaine that can be smoked. The term "crack" refers to the crackling sound heard when the mixture is heated, presumably from the sodium bicarbonate.
On the illicit market, crack, or "rock," is sold in small, inexpensive dosage units. Smoking this form of the drug delivers large quantities of cocaine to the lungs, producing effects comparable to intravenous injection. These effects are felt almost immediately after smoking, are very intense, and do not last long.

Trauma @ Emory

I just started Trauma service at Emory (Atlanta) on Monday. I'm actually not at Emory Hospital, which I assume is nice and middle class. I'm at Grady Hospital in the heart of the ghetto, and it could not be any better!!! It is soooooooo ghetto. Patients/homeless people (in this part of town, the terms are more or less interchangeable) hit you up in the hallways for money - it's great! I learned that the McDonalds next to the hospital is NOT the place to go for coffee after pre-rounding at 6:30am, as that is when all the homelss guys wake up and congregate, hoping for you to give them 50 cents for "food." Hmmmm....I'll have to find somewhere else to get coffee for the next 2 months...

*****

I knew that this would be a great place to come for trauma, since it's so giant and inner-city, and it has been everything I hoped it would be. On our first morning, traumas started rolling in at 9am (for some reason, everyone decided that Monday morning was a good time to get shot) and didn't stop. I didn't leave till 7:30pm, and they were still rolling in. I got to see a head GSW (GSW=gunshot wound, for future reference) that had brain matter all over, and got to review a bunch of neuro stuff. I got to sew up the bullet hole (just to make it look better for his family, I think, as there was no medical reason to do it....See the "P.S." below) Then I got to see a chest GSW that actually didn't look too bad, till we saw the x-ray with the bullet right in the vicinity of the spine, and realized that the patient couldn't move or feel his legs. At first I seriously thought he wasn't cooperating with me, but then I realized he wasn't faking it. Very sad....Then we got to the OR and I now can say I've seen a heart with the bottom chunk of it sheared off sort of like a heart-divot.

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P.S. My resident said if anyone asks I can now say I've done brain surgery.