Emergeny Room Nursing

by John
(Northern Indiana)

I am retired now, but the rowdy, rollicking times in the ER are among my favorite nursing career choice memories. Most of the Emergency Rooms where I worked were very small ones which were situated on Native American reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. Much of the time, I worked alone during the night shifts, but there was always help available. Some nights, only one or two patients came in and we were pretty slow. But there were also times of sheer panic which compensated for them.

For the first few months, I was terrified; worried sick that something would happen which I could not handle. It finally dawned on me that I had seem all sorts of dreadful things happen and that I had dealt with them well. Following this revelation, ER work seemed pretty routine.

Once in a while, something funny would happen. One afternoon, I was taking a temperature on a baby when I noticed a large "bruise" at the base of the baby's spine, and was ready to murder the (expletive deleted) who put the bruise there. We were very busy; so busy that I could not get the doctor's attention. After seeing three or four more babies with the same "bruise", I realized that I had been looking at "Mongolian spots", which I had never seen before. A few days later, another nurse came to me in tears, wanting me to look at a huge "bruise" on another baby. I felt rather proud of myself because I was able to allay her fears(and tears).

If our ambulance crew was out on a run, I was assigned to go with a housekeeper/driver if a second ambulance was called out. One day, when our ambulance was out someplace, we got a call that a man had a motorcycle accident about three miles away. Off I went, only to find that the cyclist had fallen onto soft ground and was very sore but basically unhurt.

We took him to the hospital anyway. He refused a backboard. We got him into the back of the ambulance. We took off. As I tried to take some vital signs, he swung his fist at my face. Using a highly illegal aikido move, I pinned his arm. He was still fighting hard. We quickly began exchanging "not so nice" pleasantries about each other ancestries, dietary habits, etc.

I suddenly realized that the driver thought that I was trying to call in a report, and was holding a microphone in my blind spot.
Upon our return to the ER, I was informed that the state police and the FCC were looking for somebody, presumably in an ambulance, who had been broadcasting obscenities all over four states. Of course, the ER doctor denied that we had an ambulance on the road, for which I was extremely grateful.

Emergency Room nursing is not always fun and games. In 1993, young, healthy people began to die, very suddenly, from an unknown disease. I was working in the ER when the first patient was brought in. That is, the first patient who survived long enough to make it into the ER. That was frightening. The patient died immediately. The ER crew was terrified. Were we all going to die from this? Were we going to take the disease home to our families and kill them too?

None of this happened. The disease was discovered, within a few weeks, to be Hantavirus. There were many more Hantavirus cases in the US, but most of the patients survived if they were treated quickly.

Hey, I could go on and on for hours about the approximately 300 times that I have been involved in a "Code Blue", or the hysterical people who had tried to take their owns lives, or the fights with drunks, but this short note could turn into a book.

My very best to all of you.

John