Fire safety, soldiers and tutorials

The day in the emergency department starts off with a small prayer at 8 am sharp followed by some statistics about the previous day; number of admissions, ambulance calls, etc...

Today was no different, except that I arrived one or two minutes after 8, and the morning meeting had already started! Tomorrow, I will be on time! Urgh I hate being late and have always made it a point to be punctual but I wonder what has been happening to me recently...

The day in the ER was alright, even though I don't think I learnt as much as the previous days. We had to attend a talk on fire safety and I had no idea what the speaker was talking about as it was all in Bahasa Malayu. I guess some of the things he said were funny because the audience laughed a few times. 

I was placed in the green zone today.  There was an english speaking patient who came in with a chief complaint of chest pain.  After a while, it was quite clear that he his problem might be psychiatric in nature. The story he had to tell seemed interesting but I was chased out of the cubicle. So, I have no idea what happened to him. 

The rest of the patients came in mostly complaining of chest pain or shortness of breath.  

A funny story though is that a soldier came in to the yellow zone after having experienced a fit. He was talking in malay, so I had a very faint idea of what he was saying. I understood  that he said his body was aching but I wasn't sure what he added. The rest of the medical students and a houseman all walked off. Another fellow medical student turned to me and said 'run. run'. It turned out that the patient threatened that if he was not given pain killers, he would punch someone. He added that he did punch a doctor some time back! I'm guessing that's the reason why every body walked away all of a sudden...

The afternoon tutorials were way more interesting. The topic was basic life support and advanced cardiac life support. Definitely something interesting and exciting! The tutor gave us several scenarios and took us along the different algorithms. 

It makes me wonder how I will act if a patient collapses in an air plane...I understand what needs to be done in such a scenario and I can even recite it out for you, but if it really happens, I wonder if panic will strike me and paralyze me. Well, it is probably to avoid these situations of panic that we are trained several times during med school.

So that concludes my day. Time to relax now and go through the ACLS guidelines one more time.