My classmates went into the emergency department (ED) last night and saw a patient with traumatic amputation of both arm and leg. They looked kind of shaken this morning, especially as the woman was a 20-year-old female who fainted unexpectedly. One of the medical students was similar in age and had also fainted at different times. They were not debriefed because the ED was understaffed at that time.
We spoke about it at the end of a lecture today on trauma. The faculty member was concerned that they had not had a chance to talk about it. She said, "Yes, we are ER docs, but we are people too. It affects us."
On the way back, my classmates were telling me other stories: seeing a patient die on the operating table, seeing a child decompensate from being completely normal to dying that afternoon. No one ever figured out why.
The other lecture this morning spoke about the psychosocial factors that kept sending patients back to the ED and how depressing it was.
I haven't seen a major trauma yet, and I have mixed feelings about it. Part of me would like to see a trauma - a small trauma in which the ED fixes everything, saves the person's life, and then everything is better. But I am secretly glad that I was not on. I am happy not to have that patient case in my memory.
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