Blood, guts and drama

The other day I had an exciting little episode at the hospital. By exciting, I mean anything involving blood, guts and drama. This episode had all of the above.

I was shadowing the head doctor in an emergency department. He would periodically send me and another medical student to assess patients before he got to them, and the unfortunate young man brought in by ambulance was one of them. He'd come over his handlebars and his friends called 911 when they saw his face. The paramedics had stabilized his spine in traction and rushed him to the ER and here he was, wheeled into the resuscitation bay.
I joined a couple of nurses at the bedside while we hurriedly attached him to a heart and blood pressure monitor and ran an IV and tried to assess the damage. He was choking on his own blood and someone stuck a suction tube into his mouth and fluid started pouring out. He was conscious and crying and one of the nurses quickly unstrapped his legs from the board and I helped her tug his jeans off. We tried to see what looked broken and what was just abrasions, and if there was a way to stop the bleeding immediately. Someone was calling his family on the phone.
He suddenly began to gag. A nurse jammed the suction in his mouth and I grabbed a towel but there were chunks appearing.
"Log roll! We gotta log roll him!" One of the male nurses shouted.
Like a fountain he began to projectile vomit, heaving under the neck brace that held him down. Everyone turned their faces and 3 or 4 of us grabbed him and on the count of 3 rolled him on his side, supporting his head and frantically trying to suction out his mouth so he wouldn't choke.
The whole area was spattered in red and he heaved and gagged and we stripped the soiled sheets out from under him and rolled him back down onto clean ones.
"Get housekeeping over here right away to clean this up!" I heard someone call.
The poor boy was crying and trying to breathe. Every few minutes he'd bring up more blood and we'd try to suction it out of his mouth. His whole body was shaking and a nurse and I covered him in a blanket, while someone tried to take a history.
I turned to one of the nurses. "Is there something in my hair?"
"Yes, honey." She said with a funny look on her face. She changed her gloves and grabbing a wet cloth, began to try to wipe the vomit out, and sponge the blood off my neck. "Hold still."
One of the male nurses glanced up at me across the bed.
"Um, Heather, you'd better go and change your coat, too."
My lovely white coat that said 'emergency department' was spattered with blood. He didn't need to tell me twice.
I felt exhilarated. How can I explain it? I wheeled the young man down the hall to get X-rays, suctioning him every now and then, and then when I brought him back, I assisted the other medical student in suturing up his lacerated mouth.
"Count the stitches." I told her.
"Why? They're dissolving sutures."
"It's something he'll want to brag about later." I said so he could hear me. "Guess how many you got, hon? 8 on your upper lip and 7 or so inside your lip."
I felt him move under my hand and I think he might have been trying to chuckle.
Later I was standing in front of the X-ray screen with my supervising doctor, the other medical student, and the nursing director. We were looking at the X-rays of his face, trying to decide what might be broken, and the nurse was trying to get the doctor to sign an ultrasound order.
"The ultrasound team is never here when I need them!" The doctor complained, annoyed. "How come they can't just run an ultrasound when I want one?"
Now here is where the drama comes in, dear readers. I didn't intend to say it, but it just popped out.
"Oh, would you like some cheese with your wine?" I said to the doctor impatiently.
There was a sudden silence. Then two simultaneous reactions. The nurse director started laughing. "I can't believe you said that, Heather! You're my new best friend!"

"Goodness, woman!" the doctor roared at me. (*See me personally for the uncensored version of his reply) "Stop acting like a nurse! You're a medical student, not a nurse! Medical students don't talk back to the doctor!"
He was right. Medical students usually just grovel. I turned six different shades of red.
"I'm really sorry. I shouldn't have said that."
But when he turned back to the X-rays I could see that he was laughing. The other medical student looked like she had swallowed something wrong.
Well, by the end of the day I'd pretty much decided I wanted to do this for the rest of my life. The young man with the smashed up face, when his mother heard what had happened to him she collapsed and had to be admitted into emergency as well, and was lying 12 beds down from him. And before I left, the doctor took me aside and offered me a job in the department.
You never know how these things are going to turn out after all.