There have been so many amazing things that I’ve seen so far at this internship! Thankfully I haven’t seen anything that has ended badly yet. The doctors where I intern at are fantastic at their job. There have been a few trauma patients that I’ve seen and all of them have survived because of the actions of the doctors and nurses. When these patients come in, the room always fills with ten to twenty people. I usually get a couple of weird looks from people who don’t know that I’m a scribe. There has been a few times where I’ve been mistaken for a nurse too.
Whenever the doctor gets an alert about a trauma patient, they get to the designated trauma room and begin to prepare for their arrival. The trauma patient is usually brought in from an ambulance and then rushed directly to that room. The doctors then ask for the story from the EMS personnel and if the patient is conscious, they will begin to ask them questions about the incident that led to them being brought in. While listening to the patient’s answers, the nurses will remove the clothing of the patient while the doctor begins to assess the situation. Technicians from x-ray will come to the room, if necessary, and begin taking x-rays of the patient with a portable machine.
The few patients I’ve seen in trauma have all been brought in for various reasons. One person was brought in because their foot was run over by a car. The car hit them slightly in the hip as the person was walking in a crosswalk. The doctor that I usually scribe for works with one or two other doctors when dealing with a trauma patient, and when the patient is stable, the doctor I’m with usually goes back to working with the other patients in the emergency department. So I don’t really get to see everything dealing with the patients, but I get to see the doctor bring them back to a stable condition and learn about some of their ailments. For example, one patient we saw fell headfirst through a car window. When they brought the patient in, their head was covered in blood. The patient seemed completely unfazed and just kept talking to the doctors as they worked. They found out that an artery near his temple was cut and they had to stitch it up before the patient bled out. After they stitched it up, the doctor I’m scribing for left and let the others take over because by then the bleeding had stopped. That was definitely an interesting patient to see! Well that’s all for now! I’ll keep posting some of my other experiences during my internship.
ALBRIGHT ELCDC 