How Trauma(tic)!

The Afrikaans students and I returned to the optometry lab on Friday morning to look at a lifesize model of the eye with interchangeable slides showing different diseases of the eye. After an hour we left to return to the National Hospital for dermatology. Unfortunately, the dermatology clinic was having a very slow day with practically no patients. Our only patient was a 65 year old man with a nodule just above his knee. The doctor asked him to remove his shirt so we could classify the “age spots” on his back based on the terms we had learned throughout the week. A sister entered the room and asked about a scar on his leg, he replied by saying he had a bypass surgery in December by Dr. Piers at Universitas. Gasp! I know him!

The doctor ushered the man into the operation room, injected an anesthetic into the nodule, and used what looked like a tiny ice cream scooper to saw/scoop of his nodule. He then burned the base of where the nodule was to kill all remaining tissue, and bandaged the wound.

After class I went back to my room to take a nap because I was on-call in the trauma ward that night from 6-11pm (or 18-23:00, if you prefer).

The first patient brought into the trauma ward that night was a 51 yr old woman who had been in a car accident. Before I saw the woman, a man walked passed me with a plastic bag of which I inspected and found it was a human arm. Holy crap. I walked over to where the woman was laying, without a right arm, and discovered that she was driving without a seat belt so when her car rolled twice, her arm was slung out the window and cut clean off. She was awake and without sedatives or anesthetics, but the amount of shock her body was experiencing kept her from feeling the pain. We found out later that her left femur was completely shattered, and she had previously suffered from a stroke which left her entire left side paralyzed. So now, as sad as it is, she has one working leg and that’s it.

The next two patients were pedestrians who had been hit by cars. The first had a broken leg just above his ankle. I was asked to remove his shoe and dear gracious me I have never smelled something so putrid in my life, and it was by far the closest I have been to passing out since I arrived. The second pedestrian accident came in about 45 min after the first and after I cut off his pants we discovered he also most likely had a broken leg, and possibly a few broken ribs as well. Nobody else was brought in before 11 so we left shortly after. I learned tonight that I can definitely handle trauma, and it doesn't bother me, but it also doesn't really spark my interest either.