A&E Posting

Currently I am in A & E posting now. I have been looking forward to this posting since semester 8. I always think that A & E doctors look smarter as they are really handling emergency cases. (Haha… I think got a lot of influences from drama too.)

Our group is posted to on-call at night. I skipped my on-call on 1st day (I was lazy). Came on-call on Tuesday around 7pm. There was not much patients yet and we gotta do a study on triage. This study need to be done as the head of department of HTJ asked us to. It’s a study to determine the number of cases which are mistriaged. Haih… we, the student, are just been used to do a study for her.

There was no admission to the critical zone but there were a few cases in semi-critical zone. I got to perform an ECG and IM injection on patients but I haven’t got the chance to set IV line as everyone is fighting to do procedures. Some of the staff nurses and MAs are really kind to teach us doing procedure. I have set IV line on obstetric patients before, but not on normal patients. It is easier to set IV line on obstetric patients as their veins are dilated. I succeeded every time when on obstetric patients but haven’t tried on normal patients. Not many cases seen on Tuesday but we got a lot of chance to do procedure.

On Wednesday, I went around 9pm. It was a boring day, as there were lesser cases seen than on Tuesday. Did ECG again but still haven’t got the chance to set drip. There was 1 case of status epilepticus. Left around 12am.

Thursday, a very busy day. We reached around 9pm too. There were a few cases in red zone (critical zone). A 17 year-old man had an MVA, involving motorbike vs motorbike. His condition was quite serious. And finally we got the chance to help out the doctors. We help to bag the patient. The patient stopped breathing and has no more pulse. It was really acute. We get to helped out to resuscitate the patient. This is the 1st time I am doing CPR on a real patient. I actually did wrongly and the doctor stopped me. All of us took turn to do CPR and after 15 minutes, we failed to resuscitate the patient. It was really sad when we need to stop resuscitating and the patient’s family was crying out there. After that, we also helped the staff nurse to clean up the patient. This was a memorable experience and I think I never forget it. Although I failed at my 1st time, I really hope that in the future, I get to save patient whenever I need to do a CPR.

Actually during the 1st two days of the posting, I was quite disappointed as the doctors in A & E look quite slack. I can’t really feel the tense atmosphere of A & E. But after the incident, I really can see that the doctors are doing things. It is very acute when there is an emergency case. At least there is no ignorance… I am really interested in emergency medicine, maybe I’ll take up emergency medicine as my specialty.