Q3 - JOURNAL ENTRIES

Journal entries from the third quarter of my second year in basic specialist emergency training:

• • • Today, I had to explain to a young patient that his foreskin had swollen up because he’d left it retracted behind the glans after having sex with his girlfriend. After successfully reducing it, I was hit by the nastiest, most pungent smell as all the trapped debris and secretions were exposed. I nearly passed out and had to leave the room. After mustering up some courage, I went back in wearing a mask and explained to him the importance of hygiene. His girlfriend then asked me whether she could still go down on him.

    • I’m telling my drunk patient that he can go home if he can show me that he can safely walk. He stands up from the bed, drops his completely full urine bottle all over my shoes and just leaves. I guess he passed.

    • This nun comes up to me to complain about the waiting times – and she has every right to. She tells me she’d been there for some six hours. I pull up her triage notes, which state that she had actually registered only a couple of hours earlier. “The Bible teaches us not to lie, Sister,” I go. “I’m not lying!” she retorts. “Then I guess the paper is,” I reply.

    • A man with an intellectual disability was woken up by another man with an intellectual disability trying to gouge out his eyeball with his fingers. He was brought to ED and, because blood was accumulating behind the eye and dangerously increasing the pressure, the ophthalmologist had to cut through the outer corner of the eyelid and release the tendon beneath it to decompress the orbit. The scissors weren’t exactly the sharpest. It was absolutely dreadful. And kinda cool.

• • • After giving this guy the whole lecture about coming to emergency with what looked like a simple cold, I had to go back to him with my tail between my legs and offer him an admission – his inflammatory markers were through the roof. Humbling…

    • This guy gets brought into hospital by the police because he’s intoxicated. One of our senior doctors is seeing him:

Senior: “Did you take any drugs?”

Patient: “What’s it to you?”

Senior: “I’m sorry, it’s just policy to ask.”

Patient: “What the hell do you think I took, huh? Snowballs? Dolphins?!”

My senior proceeds to laugh out loud. The patient proceeds to destroy the entire cubicle. The police proceed to lose the two-page police certificate I had literally just handed them right before the whole fiasco.

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    • It’s a busy day at the ED. “It’s Wednesday!” goes my colleague, “What do you expect?”. We say this every day nowadays.

    • One of our frequent flyers who comes in daily with chest pain has just presented with a heart attack. Everyone’s in shock. 

    • A patient approached me and gave me an entire speech about how I saved her and that she’ll forever be grateful for the work I’ve done. It wasn’t me. 

• • • A patient I had managed to literally bring back from death came to the ED a few weeks later because of a cough. She told me to say thanks to the guy who saved her.