Once Upon a Lifetime

Notable to who?  There were several things that happened at work earlier that I found Notable, but I’m not sure if anyone else, especially anyone who is not interested in medical emergencies would agree.

I work at a level 1 trauma center, and the hospital is not located in a safe area.  We are the only community hospital in the area, and we care for anyone/everyone who presents to our facility.  We also accept patients from all the other hospitals in the area who won’t care for patients without insurance, or won’t treat patients who will likely have a poor outcome… it’s part of my job to advocate for patients whether they are at our facility or not.  Thankfully, my job does not require payment collections or insurance clearance, which is not always the case with other air-medical services. 

This afternoon, our trauma center got several patients with extensive and extreme injuries in the span of about 20 minutes.  We are all used to being busy at our hospital, both in my department and the hospital in general, so everyone who has been at our hospital beyond orientation has probably learned this.  We were requested to fly to a scene in GA for a motorcycle crash, but our closest asset was out of service, so another service took the flight.  They brought the patient to our hospital, and not long after, we got the request from an ER in Georgia to send the patients 6 year old daughter to us.  Apparently, she was riding on the back of her dad’s motorcycle… at the same time, we launched one of our other aircrafts to another scene in GA for a GSW to the chest…  then we had several trauma alerts, and a stroke alert brought in via rescue.  The aircraft that went to the GSW scene wasn’t able to give us report due to the patient’s condition, which is uncommon for the medical crew who was flying.  The first patient who was flown in from the motorcycle crash took longer than expected to offload, which almost caused a problem for the second aircraft with the gunshot patient.  A couple of nurses from our trauma center met the air crew with the GSW patient on the helipad with blood and a few ED techs.  My job is to coordinate all the chaos and try to make these processes go as smoothly as possible… some days are easier than others.