- Jun 5, 2005
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So...yea, I'm an ER nurse as some know. What a night tonight....wow thats about all I can say.
Besides our normal trauma, assaults, car accidents and whatnot...we had a couple interesting to say the least cases...first was a burn victim that set himself on fire with gasoline...and burned over 80% of his body. Kinda terrible, to be sure, worse was he was still very suicidal when he got to us. He's got about a 50-50 chance right about now if he makes it through the first few days he's got ALOT better chance of making it....and then not 10 minutes after that...
Multi-gunshot wound to chest and belly, was losing blood internally very quickly, and eek no exit wounds on any of his gunshot wounds. Thats ALWAYS a bad thing. The decision was made to immediately hang O- blood and in our terms, crack his chest, AKA, an emergency thoracotomy, fortunately for him my ER practically wrote the book on this procedure and in less than 60 seconds our senior physician was reaching inside this mans chest to perform cardiac massage, then internally shocked his heart with defibrillator paddles and cross clamped his aorta(largest artery in your body just to control the bleeding into his abdomen) THen he was rushed off to the OR all in less than 10 minutes. And for now he made it. IF he lives the next 24 hours he's got a dang good chance of leaving the hospital alive.
We'll see.
Another night in the life of this ER nurse.
Just thought I'd share.
Also, Thoracotomy link from wikipedia for those interested in reading.
If you want to see some VERY graphic and probably VERY NSFW pictures of what a thoracotomy looks like on a real patient, then click pics of open chest from trauma.org
Besides our normal trauma, assaults, car accidents and whatnot...we had a couple interesting to say the least cases...first was a burn victim that set himself on fire with gasoline...and burned over 80% of his body. Kinda terrible, to be sure, worse was he was still very suicidal when he got to us. He's got about a 50-50 chance right about now if he makes it through the first few days he's got ALOT better chance of making it....and then not 10 minutes after that...
Multi-gunshot wound to chest and belly, was losing blood internally very quickly, and eek no exit wounds on any of his gunshot wounds. Thats ALWAYS a bad thing. The decision was made to immediately hang O- blood and in our terms, crack his chest, AKA, an emergency thoracotomy, fortunately for him my ER practically wrote the book on this procedure and in less than 60 seconds our senior physician was reaching inside this mans chest to perform cardiac massage, then internally shocked his heart with defibrillator paddles and cross clamped his aorta(largest artery in your body just to control the bleeding into his abdomen) THen he was rushed off to the OR all in less than 10 minutes. And for now he made it. IF he lives the next 24 hours he's got a dang good chance of leaving the hospital alive.
We'll see.
Another night in the life of this ER nurse.
Just thought I'd share.
Also, Thoracotomy link from wikipedia for those interested in reading.
If you want to see some VERY graphic and probably VERY NSFW pictures of what a thoracotomy looks like on a real patient, then click pics of open chest from trauma.org
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