An excerpt from Trauma Room Two.
Sometimes when I am bored, when it is all sore throats and dental pains, when I feel more like I am a social worker and a hand-holder than an emergency medicine physician, I play a game.
I do not look at the chart before …
We are data druggies.
We spend our days like desperate junkies crawling the carpet, sifting through the shaggy strands of patient histories with shaky fingers in search of facts. Every word our patients utter we feed to the never-ending demands of the electronic chart.
We find a fact and we enter it. The database grows. Someone somewhere adds another question we are supposed to …
The girl seizes.
Her body torques and twists and jerks about like a snake trapped on an electric fence. She flops back and forth on the gurney before us, her pale forehead glistening with sweat, her brown hair wetted black from the effort of muscle contractions that threaten to tear apart her tiny frame.
Trauma room two is silent save for the gluck-gluck-gluck of her …
Right now, there are two patients in every room. One is made with flesh, bones, and blood. One is made with a monitor, a mouse, and a keyboard.
Both demand my time.
Both demand my concentration.
A little over two weeks ago I wrote the short story “Please Choose One.” I posted it online. The response it generated exceeded anything I could …
Please choose one:
The three words blink in front of me on the computer screen.
Please choose one:
Patient is-
☐Male ☐Female
I click FEMALE.
I watch as the auto-template feature fills in the paragraph for me based on my choices.
Patient #879302045
Patient is: 38-year-old female status post motor vehicle accident. Please acknowledge you have reviewed her allergies, medications, and past medical history.
I click YES.
Have you counseled her about smoking cessation?
I click NO.
A little, animated icon of a …
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