Ah, the Newbies...

If people learned ahead of time what working in the medical field was really all about, nobody would ever do it. "Danny" just got certified and is brand spanking new to his job at the hospital, so new he only got his nametag tonight. He laughed at me when I asked him if he was current on all of his shots. I wasn't kidding. When the shift began he was all too happy to help, asking me to let him know if there was anything he could do to help Ron and I. He was eager to see it all and experience it all but by the end of the night he was more or less running around like a chicken with his head cut off and learning that sometimes around here, it's everybody for themself.

The shift tonight included these highlights: an elderly dementia patient who managed to leave his room minus his clothes and roam out into the corridor not once but twice, one full Code Blue, one incoming LifeAlert chopper to pick up a Neuro trauma, a patient offered to sell me narcotics (she offered to Danny too), a fishing hook extraction (self inflicted to the back of the head while attempting to cast a line), a drunk mother screaming at and threatening to kill her son (age 7-9ish and terrified), a serious cat bite, some asshole pinched me, the same asshole spit on Ron, and my favorite: the woman with the DT's who attempted to lick my arm. When her doctor arrived and I gave report, he asked if she tried to bite me, and when I said no, he laughed and said "well, I guess she is making progress then..."

By night's end Danny looked different. Shell shocked was more like it. The life they depict in the college courses is nothing like real life in the ER. When he asked me what I was doing, (the hallucinating DT woman was certain there were mice in her bed and I was pretending to chase them away so she would settle down- which actually worked!) I looked at him and asked him if he REALLY wanted to know. He got the picture. Sometimes its better NOT to know around here, makes life a helluva lot easier.


PS: I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, and was surprised last weekend to see Danny come out to the ambulance bay. He'd heard the radio chatter earlier in ED and thought perhaps it was Ron and I again and wanted to say hello. We quizzed Danny about how life was treating him (had the nurses been nasty to him, had certain doctors ignored him, had he figured out yet why I asked him if his shots were up to date?) he seems to have survived and is holding his own. When Ron and I left Ron said he thought Danny might make it after all, which made me laugh as (to put it in Ron's words) he'd said after that first night "that poor little bastard is gonna be eaten alive!..." So Good Luck Danny, if you can survive being a Newbie, you can survive anything.