What’s more fun than a resident turning bright red?

A resident turning bright fuchsia!! Yeah!

Well, during one of my shifts at the trauma center, I got to have a little fun. It was just a regular ol’ night in the busy ED, yada, yada, yada. OK, OK, I’ll just get to the good stuff. We get a call on the EMS line for a 922 trauma (like a medium trauma – 911 means all hands on deck, major body parts missing and all that jazz). There’s a GSW to the right upper quadrant coming in.

I look at my resident, who is 3 months from graduating, and I point to him. “It’s all you, buddy.”

“Me?” he asks. “You got it,” I replied.

When I first got out of residency, I felt like I needed to establish my own comfort level with my practice before taking on residents full time. My personal feeling is that until you’ve been out in the middle of nowhere with a heart attack in one room and a woman coding in the next with little or no backup, it’s a little hard to explain to a resident what you would do if you don’t have every specialty on God’s green earth at your disposal.

I’m sure some people could spout out literature and sections of Tintinalli and Rosen from memory much better than I could, but my experiences in the last 3 years, working mostly by myself, have taught me so much.

It’s only in the last year or so that I’ve been more and more comfortable sitting back and letting residents take the lead. Emergency medicine residents from the UAB EM program do 2 months of a community rotation with us, and they always do a great job. But, as you know, the more confident you become in your own abilities, the more you can let go.

So as we are waiting for this trauma to come in, we hear this holler coming from the other end of the emergency department. “Get a wheelchair!” someone yells. “Oh, God. Oh, God!” another, deeper voice echoes.

A woman in green scrubs, whom I didn’t know (but later discovered it was one of the staff OB/GYNs), wheels a diaphoretic guy down the hall. He is dressed in a Burger King uniform and is extremely agitated.

“Is this the trauma?” I’m asking our charge nurse. “I don’t think so,” she says. She’s just as confused as I am. She sends someone to figure out what’s going on and security to make sure the place is secure. The area the man was wheeled from could only be accessed by someone with a name badge. Meanwhile, I send my resident into the room. “He’s been shot in the chest!” someone says.