Davis Compassion Amidst the Chaos

Tales told by an ER Doc
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-0983-4070-4
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 226 Seiten

No one schedules an appointment with an Emergency Room Doctor. You meet one when life doesn't go as planned. Survival requires immediate dependence and trust in a stranger in a white coat. As soon as the imminent danger has passed- they are off to the next case. Many patients don't realize that their stories stay with those that served them. Patients have the most to teach about humility and humanity.' Compassion Amidst the Chaos' is brimming with the tension, anguish, exhaustion, relief, gratitude, and compassion that are all part of a typical day at work in the ER. Travel with Dr. Chris Davis through the cases he remembers most from his 35-year career as an emergency medicine doctor.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Davis, Kathleen

Leseproben

Choosing a Career:
Finding the Right Fit From MIT to Medical School How did I find myself rescuing a woman in labor in sub-freezing cold after a traffic accident? For me, it has been a fun and fascinating journey. I grew up in a Navy family. My dad had been an extremely successful officer in the Navy as a civil engineer. After being imprisoned for forty-two months in a notorious POW camp in Japan during WW II, he remained on active duty and went from lieutenant to becoming a two-star admiral in only fifteen years. I was also fortunate to have a very bright, empathetic mother and three sisters. Like everyone else, my youth had good news and bad news. Because my dad’s career had rocketed so quickly to success, the Navy moved us a lot. In fact, between kindergarten and graduating from high school, I had been enrolled in ten separate schools. The obvious downside of that peripatetic life was that I had made few lasting friendships growing up. As my dad’s success had given me a tremendous fear of failure, the two combined to make me quite a nerd. I studied hard and usually had the highest GPA in whatever school I was attending. The other challenge was that my dad-imposed Navy-style discipline upon his kids. That tended to smother out any feelings of levity when he was around. I was never particularly interested in sports until I rowed crew in college so didn’t feel I had a lot to offer in male conversations. However, there was plenty of good news. My three sisters taught me that if I asked a lady a question about a topic that she enjoyed, I would learn something new and interesting, and she might even like me! Science and math had always interested me, and I assumed I would follow that pathway in college. During my senior year in high school, we were stationed in Hawaii where I attended the highly regarded Punahou High School. I was accepted to MIT and, thanks to warm endorsements from Punahou’s faculty, Harvard had shown an interest in me. At that time, the Vietnam War was building. The resultant increase in college protests against America’s involvement in that conflict deeply angered my admiral father. When we talked about what college I should attend, he made it clear that a liberal arts-based college, such as Harvard, was out of the question. To make his point, he calmly said: “Well Chris, you have a choice. It’s MIT or the Marine Corps.” I went to MIT. As school to this point had been rather easy for me, I failed to develop the most crucial elements of academic success: being organized and to not procrastinate. Before going to MIT, I had passed the Advanced Placement course in calculus and so MIT waived that requirement. I decided to take the course again believing that an “A” would be an easy way to start my college career. I got a “C-.” Fortunately, I had joined a fine fraternity, Sigma Chi. My fraternity brothers quickly set out to correct my academic behavioral weaknesses and were quite successful. My improvement at MIT was like a freight train getting underway: the improvement was painfully slow but definite. I enrolled in the mechanical engineering program at MIT, which I found truly interesting. Having grown up in the military, I also was comfortable signing up for the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps (AFROTC), as the Air Force offered me a full scholarship. That was terrific—but the devil was in the details. If I failed to graduate from MIT after eight semesters, I would need to repay my scholarship by serving in the Air Force as an enlisted man for four years. Like so many college students, I was becoming more concerned about the Vietnam War. The photo of a young Vietnamese child running after having been napalmed shocked the world. In those days, careers in mechanical engineering largely meant designing military equipment such as jet fighters. I remember Moshe Dayan’s famous comment: “Fighter planes are not washing machines. They are killing machines.” At that point, I started to give serious thought towards becoming a doctor. One afternoon, I had a meeting with the “pre-med” advisor for MIT. She had been amazed at how many students at MIT wanted to go to medical school. Her theory was the same as mine; MIT students were becoming progressively less interested in the military-industrial complex. She suggested that I work as a volunteer in the emergency department of the Boston City Hospital to get a feeling for what it might be like. I took her advice and never looked back. Ultimately, by my senior year in 1968, I had been I accepted by four medical schools, including the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. My girlfriend, Kathleen, had just graduated from Wellesley and had a job lined up in Cambridge to help with neurological research at Harvard. By this time, I had racked up six months of being America’s most love-sick puppy. The thought of Kathleen working at Harvard filled me with anxiety of astronomical dimensions. As GW was located only a short plane ride to Boston, I chose GW’s medical school. GW turned out to be a terrific choice for me. Now, I want to take you back to my sophomore year at MIT and Boston City Hospital. Lessons as an ER Volunteer: Boston City Hospital I wore my first student white coat one night in Boston City Hospital in October 1965. The ID tag on the coat lapel displayed my name hastily written with a leaky ballpoint pen: C. Davis, Volunteer. I was nervous. Everyone in the ER assumed that as a college student volunteer, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. The charge nurse kept a close eye on me. The Boston City Hospital ER in those days was small and dimly lit by overhead fluorescent bulbs. The new patients waiting to be “clocked in” were sitting in a row along the corridor. At the end of the corridor was a metal desk, labeled “triage”, where I took their “histories.” My job was to enter on the chart the patient’s name, address, age, sex and a brief description of why they had come to the ER. At the bottom was one line on which was printed: PMH, Meds, Allergies. The charge nurse explained to me that PMH meant “past medical history.” It was less overwhelming for me that all the patients that I saw had been healthy enough to walk in with sore throats, an injured arm, cough, etc. After an hour or so, I thought that my responsibilities were not so scary after all. After I had completed each patient’s history form, I walked a few steps down the somewhat dingy corridor to the charge nurse’s desk where I placed each chart in a black metal bin. The charge nurse’s name as I recall was Murphy. This being Boston, Irish names were very common. She was short, 5’2” at most, with long hair stacked on top of her head as was the style back then. “Ms. Murphy, do you ever have a problem with violent people coming through the front door? I mean, you are sitting right near the front door.” She grinned at me and hopped off her high chair. She reached into the side of her desk and pulled out an enormous “nightstick,” the kind of club police officers carry. “I’ve never actually been in danger,” she said with a smile. She quickly returned the weapon to the inside of her desk in hopes that the patients had failed to notice it. According to the chart, one of my patients was a man in his early 60s complaining of diarrhea. I called out the name on the chart, George Jones. He was seated in the hallway next to the triage desk. This small, tired Black man slowly stood up and shuffled over and sat down. I asked, “George, what seems to be the problem?” He replied, “I got diarrhea real bad.” Being a medical neophyte, that didn’t seem to me like such a huge problem that would require him to come to the ER on a Saturday night. I asked him additional questions, but I was uncomfortable getting the history within earshot of the long line of patients waiting to be seen along the hall. He went on to explain, “I drive a garbage truck. My job is to lift the trash into the back of the truck. But yesterday, I had watery shits every hour. Lifting a heavy trash can when you feel that your bowels are about to blow up is powerful (sic) awful. I had to stop lots of times to go. I was very late finishing my route. My boss was mad.” Being a hopeless rookie, I did not know what questions to ask. Was I supposed to ask if he had chills, fever or if he had abdominal pain? There were many symptoms that I should have asked about had I really understood what I was doing. Moments later, one of the Boston University medical residents picked up George Jones’ chart and invited him back to a small treatment area while I proceeded to interview the next patient. After George had been seen by one of the doctors, one of the second-year medical residents took me aside and said, “Don’t worry about getting the clinical history. If you do, you will slow us down. Just name, address and complaint. That’s all. We’ll do the rest.” That helped. Once I realized that my job was only clerical, I felt less nervous. After George Jones had received his prescription and was ready to leave, he motioned to me with his hand to come over so that he could speak to me. He craned his neck back to read my name tag. “Hmm. Davis. Volunteer. What are you doing here?” “I’m just trying to help out. I think that I might want to go to medical school, so I am here to learn.” “Hmm.” He replied again. “Are you in school now?” “Yes. I am an engineering student at MIT.” He paused, again. “You are obviously a smart boy and...