Day 3: Emergency Department

Whenever I go to the hospital, I regard the people wearing scrubs as gods, and today I finally got to be one of those people. However, I quickly realized how far from being “God” these people really are. I learned that the doctors in the Emergency Department can’t really do much for a patient that does not have a problem as obvious as broken bone or an open wound. Unless the patient is in critical condition and needs surgery, the doctor can only recommend sleep, ibuprofen, painkillers, or antibiotics. After that, the patient leaves as he or she came, in the hopes that in a couple of days his or her health will return back to normal.

In the Emergency Department I was able to see a many different patients complaining about a spectrum of different things. The smaller, more insignificant injuries came to the side of the department I was in (express waiting). Things like people having sinus infections, ear infections, coughs etc. were quickly dismissed with a recommendation of medicine and rest. Then there were some patients with broken bones. One young man came in with a fractured fifth metatarsal (a bone in the foot that attaches to the pinky toe), and another man came with a fractured bone in his leg which had happened four weeks earlier in Vietnam. Again, not much could be done for these people, since the body would do the healing on its own. One little girl came in with strange skin lesions and an abscess in the ear. The abscess was drained, and the doctors did not know the cause of her lesions so she was sent to dermatology to have it figured out. That is where her story in the Emergency Department ended. Another young man came in with a cut on his chin. He was given the necessary analgesic and then stitched up, and on he went. Another man complained about pain in his eyes due to sparks. The doctor put a dye in his eye that reacted with his cornea and where the cornea was damaged the dye would turn green instead of purple. The man did have some damage to his cornea, but he was told that the it was the fastest healing part of the body and then released. These doctors knew what they were doing, but there wasn’t really anything that they could do with these patients that their bodies would not do on their own.  

What I learned from being in the ED is that we have to take care of our bodies. It’s the only one we are going to get, and what we put in it to nourish it and what we do to it in everyday life can have a consequence that we will have to deal with for the rest of our lives. Doctors can give you medicine to lessen the pain, but the problem may never go away. Unlike the other departments I was in where the doctors specialize in their patient’s care, these doctors attend to an umbrella of problems and have to discern whether the patient needs to go into another department for special care or simply go home. They don’t know the backstory of the patients nor what will happen next.