Okay, Okay, so I spoke too soon!

I've done 3 shifts in the ER now, and while I'm exhausted, I'm having a good time (still would never do ER though!). Except for a few select ER nurses with the perpetual panties-in-a-bunch, most of them are really great, although slow....It's not unusual for your lab orders to sit on the chart, for no particular reason, for 3 hours or so....I don't know why - they have more nurses here than I've seen anywhere else...It's just that most of them don't seem to do a heck of a lot. I've taken to starting all my own IVs and drawing my labs, which is a great skill to have at Grady. I also made the happy discovery that even if your patient is 10th on the radiology list, if you just wheel them over and dump them in the radiology prep area, they tend to take them, without seeming to realize that they're out of order....It's great!

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So far, I've had a new diagnosis of a brain tumor, I've gotten to see a patient with a recurrent pituitary adenoma (with all the classical symptoms/signs except she didn't have bitemporal hemianopsia, which I was kind of disappointed about), and I've gotten to see a bunch of cool things all related to crack use. Who would've thought crack could be so fun? And educational! What has suprised me is how sick 99% of the patients are here - and even on the "slow" side. (The ER is divided into two zones - the Blue Zone, which is the medical, i.e. "slow" side, and the Red Zone, which is the trauma/surgery side and tends to have much sicker patients). I've only had 1 social visit, which was a homeless guy who just wanted to get out of the rain for a bit. So we got him some dry clothes and a sandwich, and he hung out in the asthma treatment room for the night. I almost like it more than a community hospital - there you see a lot more psych-induced problems...I thought there'd be more of that in a county hospital, but apparently not.
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On another note, they gave us yet ANOTHER assignment - a tedious bore of a group project of which I will spare you the details. I was sorely tempted to raise my hand and ask when our TIPS reports were going to be due (If you haven't heard of TIPS reports, you need to watch "Office Space.").