Things have certainly changed in my career. I am no longer hating my job. In fact, I am appreciating what a cool and unique job that I have.
2 days ago, I was flying on Mercy Air (helicopter air medical transport service) and we landed on the freeway for a guy on a motorcycle who had his lower leg amputated. I feel slightly strange to say that it was SO AWESOME! A major interstate was stopped, we landed and there were a ton of people pulled over watching, taking pictures of the helicopter. The guy was hit by a car and dragged. His right leg was hanging on by a piece of skin. We stabilized him and flew to the hospital. Pretty freaking cool.
In the ER a few days before that, I had 2 thoracotomies in the same day. This is a big deal, at least around here. A thoracotomy is when you open up the chest with "rib spreaders" and directly do CPR on the heart and can shock the heart directly with paddles while trying to find source of bleeding--usually clamping off the aorta as a temporizing method until the patient can go to the OR. It was pretty freaking cool. The first guy was a gunshot wound, he made it to the OR and to the ICU. The second one was a sad case. 28 year old female stabbed in the back, came in with CPR in progress. Her x-husband stabbed her in the back and turns out he got the pulmonary artery. She was pregnant. We worked on her pretty hard--she made it to the OR but didn't survive. We were injecting epinephrine directly into the heart, along with calcium, atropine, shocking it, etc. basically anything to keep it going. It was such an adrenaline rush! At the same time, I do realize what a terribly sad case it was. She had 2 kids at home too. Very awful.
So I am now back to loving the emergency department. It can majorly suck at times, and I can feel absolutely crazy, but at the same time...WOW!
