Christopher and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

The last few weeks haven't been great, but Sunday took the cake. I am Q2 call right now; on call every other night. It is 'home call' so I am supposed to leave the hospital at 5pm and just answer pages from home. Of course patients tend to disregard my schedule and visit the ER at all hours.

Anyway on a background of constant exhaustion, I had a particularly bad day on Sunday. First I got stuck with a needle in the OR. The risk of getting anything from non-hollow needle stick when double gloved is minimal, but nevertheless it was disconcerting. After the case, which was a pretty involved surgery for a sick patient, I noticed that somehow the patient had bled all over my right sock. It was a nice new comfy sock but even the best sock loses its appeal with blood on it.

It was over the weekend so Employee Health was closed, and I had to go to the ER to have my blood drawn after the needlestick for testing. I thought they would just be able to look me over and draw my blood, but I had to register and actually be admitted as a patient to the ER. They got me into exam room 11 which was the corner pocket of a larger room divided by curtains into 'exam rooms.' The ER nurse started to take my vital signs, and at that moment I was paged. I answered the call from the phone in exam room and as soon as I dialed, I could hear ringing outside my room. Someone picked up on the other end, and both through the phone and through the curtain outside the room I heard "Emergency Department, how can I help you?" Turns out it was the ER attending calling to tell me that there was a patient in exam room 12 that needed to be admitted to the surgical team. Conveniently enough, ER exam rooms 11 and 12 are part of that same large curtain divided room. I hung up the phone, pulled back the curtain and started to interview and examine the patient, my roommate in 12. In the middle of the interview I got called back to the other side of the curtain to have my blood drawn, and I kept on bouncing back and forth until I was discharged and he was admitted.

I finished up my roommate's admissions orders and then got called to the ICU to see the patient from the OR. His blood pressure was low and he heart was racing. I went up to take a look at him, gave him some medicine to slow his heart down, and decided that he needed central and arterial lines. I prepped him and was in the middle of putting in the lines when underneath the sterile drape I began to feel a drip, drip, drip on my left foot, and my one remaining clean sock. Somehow the nurse's aide had not properly closed the urinary catheter and so with a hole in my left hand from the needlestick, a whole in my right hand from the ER, and a bloody right foot, I now realized that my patient was inadvertently peeing on my left foot.

I finished up the procedure, got the patient stabilized, and then showered, changed, cleaned my shoes, threw away my socks and finally headed home at 1:00am, 20 hours after I arrived that morning, 8 hours after I was supposed to have left, and about 3 hours from when I would have to get up the following morning.

I was exhausted and just trying to get home for a little sleep, when I was pulled over. The police officer turned on his spotlight and walked up to the Jeep. He asked me to roll down my window, and I burst out laughing at the fact that I was in a Jeep with the top down and we could clearly and easily see each other and communicate but he still wanted me to "roll down" my window. Chuckling, I tried to oblige, but my windows are just the zip up plastic Jeep windows and the zipper gets stuck half way. I could only unzip the back bottom corner of the window and then try to talk to him through that little hole. It was completely absurd. He asked for my license, and then I realized that the ER registrar took my license, and I had forgotten it when I ran up to see my patient in the ICU. He let me off with a stern warning and some good advice to avoid speeding past a police station.

Also on the bright side all of the source patient's blood tests for HIV, hepatitis, etc. were negative.