"Dani I need help in here!" I didn't even need to look to see what room she was calling from, I didn't even need to respond, all I needed to do was focus. The sound of my heartbeat filled my ears and the ice cold sensation of adrenaline filled my veins. I grabbed the door frame and slid on the freshly cleaned floors and spun into the patients room. Gloving up I stood next to the nurse to see a patient screaming in pain and to see the nurse holding pressure on his hip, blood covering the sheets and the pillows elevating his leg. I took over the pressure and she ran out of the room, explaining that the on-call doc was on his way as well as the surgical team.
We generally don't see anything like this, for the most part our nights are full of long conversations about life and advice between bathroom breaks and checking in on snoring patients. But every now and then, excitement jumps in, and I get a chance to show off my skills. I made small talk with the patient as the nurse made frantic phone calls. Suddenly a doctor sprinted into the room, finishing putting on his scrub top and grabbed gloves. As he saw me and then saw the nurse run in after him he looked to her.
"Who did you call?" He asked.
"Everyone." The Nurse replied breathlessly.
He had what appeared to be a hematoma. When we first recieved the patient from the PACU he mentioned pain on a graft site and we examined it, but we weren't quite sure what it could be. We applied ice to it and paged a doctor, and from there, I had no idea what had happened until this moment. According to the patient his site just...exploded and the blood oozed everywhere. I placed tighter pressure on his site and I studied his face as he winced in pain.
"Lets get this guy some pain meds!" I holled out to the doctor and nurse who were talking right outside the door. As I yelled this another doc came running in and then did a quick examination. The decision had been made, he had to be sutured there and then.
This doesn't always happen in medicine. This doesn't always happen in real life, but we do always ignore that little bit of pain. Sure we examine it, we feel it, but then we toss it aside and wait for something bigger to happen.
My father did the same thing. He always had migraines, he always had stomach aches. It just became a way of life that after dad ate, he was sick. We figured it was stress, or simply his job, but one day after work my mother took him to the hospital. He dropped over 10 lbs in a week. He was sick, and we had to do something. He was just trying to ignore the pain.
A good friend of mine had a similar situation, he had stomachaches that left him bedridden for days, he would sleep for days at a time. He was sick, and instead blamed it on his habits (drinking and smoking) and decided against a doctor. Two months ago he went to a doctor, and has been to the doctor 3-4 times a week since, there is still no diagnosis. There may have been, if he hadn't ignored the pain.
We need pain in our lives to help us know when we are okay and when we are not. We need the pain just like we need the air we breathe. It just sucks that we have to feel it so often.
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