Thursday, October 2, 2008

Stairway to Heaven

Overhead pages - asking a patient to return to their unit, calling our ICU-based code team to a patient's room - are generally ignored in the ER because they never apply to us (the one exception being pages for respiratory/anesthesia/code in CT, when everyone pauses for a second and thinks, "Is that my patient?").  

A couple weeks ago I was working at triage when a code was called in a stairwell on the 5th floor.  As usual, nobody thought anything of it until a minute later, when the trauma team was paged to the same location.  Another nurse and I started wondering what was going on up there, when one of the other techs came and grabbed me to help bring a backboard and collar up to the patient.

Huffing it up the stairs rather than waiting for the elevator, we noticed a few drops of blood leaking from the 4th floor landing to the 3rd.  The 4th floor had blood streaming down its walls, and by the time we reached the crowd of doctors, nurses, respiratory techs, and curious bystanders huddled on the 5th floor landing, we discovered where it was coming from.

An older female, who was visiting a family member in the hospital, had stumbled and fallen down the stairs, giving her a nasty and deep laceration on her skull.  Fighting to maneuver the backboard through the crowd, I helped the other tech slide her on as we waded through the blood that had only recently been controlled.  We carried her back up the stairs to a waiting stretcher (just like stairwell extraction in EMT class), and then ran back down again to meet her in the trauma bay, where she received some well-deserved stitches.

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