Lessons from the ER, Part II: Keep Your Mouth Shut

3:08am. Lord.

I sat there in my chair, constantly pushing F5, hoping that new test results would come back from the lab so I could update them in my chart and get rid of the patient. I felt my eyes start to droop.

I should’ve saved those 5-Hour Energy Shots for night shift instead of using them last night before to barhop with my idiot friends. Smart, Gordo. No wonder you’re not in med school yet.

“Man, this is TERRIBLE. It is just so SLOW tonight.” All the nurses sitting around perked up from their iPhones. Daggers shot from their eyes straight into the suddenly apologetic soul of my physician.

“DOCTOR P. YOU HAVE BEEN WORKING HERE FOR SEVEN YEARS. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU EVER SAY THAT WORD IN THESE FOUR WALLS?”

“Oh come on, you know what I mea-”

“EVEN THESE ROOKIE SCRIBES AREN’T AS DUMB AS YOU, DOCTOR P. SERIOUSLY.”

(Gee, thanks for thinking so highly of us.)

One of the crusty old nurses who perpetually claims she’s “soooo ready to retire” (she’s still here) blared loudly enough to wake one of the psych patients who was giving us the business earlier until we knocked him out with enough Ativan to kill a horse. No thanks to this nurse, we spent the next hour listening to our buddy go on and on about how the Mushroom King (I assume he meant Mario) would punish us all by throwing marijuana out his window and that the karma police would burn the White House down, which of course segued straight into an admittedly decent rendition of “Karma Chameleon.”
 
Yet another lesson I picked up from the ED that the books didn’t teach me: superstition counts. It doesn’t matter how empty the ER is or how much you believe that nobody will come to the ER for the next hour. As soon as you utter that cursed word – “slow” – within half an hour, three ambulance will pull up with patients who have heart attacks, gunshot wounds, or PCP intoxication, probably all three in the same patient. Never, EVER say the “s” word, no matter how many years of your soul you’ve signed to your Emergency Department.