At least it wasn't the couch

So I'm on call again. As always. What else is new?

Sunday was my last call, and OH. MY. GOD. did it suck. Sucked like a Hoover in a hurricane. Tonight, tonight's going a little better. It helps that my "moonlighter" (we typically have a moonlighter on from 5-11 with us, who is usually a medicine fellow of some sort - mostly GI - or sometimes one of the Locum Tenens types. They're useful to us, but really, their moonlighting function is for the attending, so they can go home at 5 and only come in if there's a serious crisis) is one of the most competent attendings we have and also one of the more delightful people in the department. She's very cool about just handling whatever needs to be handled. It's nice.

And, guess what. I got to sew. I did! On a person again. Ohhhhh, it was wicked cool.

It actually started our evening with quite a bang. Shortly after 5 (when everything switches over to the "on call" folk and everyone else goes home), they called a medical stat (think of a code blue, but a little less dire than that) on the medium-security forensics unit. And, much like a code, when you hear that, you move. And if you aren't one of the ones moving, you get out of the way. So I take off running (I do run pretty fast for a fat girl) and when I get up to F-Med (and someone finally lets us in behind all the security doors) there's just blood everywhere. I mean, everywhere. Apparently one of the patients got out of control, decked a staff member so badly we had to send him to the real hospital, and knocked this other patient across the back of the head with a chair, opening up about a 6 cm-long gash. And between the two of them, they bled all over everything like a couple of stuck pigs (the assailant, by the way, had nary a scratch on him, ended up in four-point hard leathers and bought himself a ticket over to the maximum security side).

I have mentioned that forensics is my specialty of choice, right?

So I got to sew his head up. Ohhhh, I do miss the sewing. It took me the first suture or two to get my groove back (it has been over two years, you know), but it's like falling off a bike. I was telling him, as I was stitching, about the last head I sewed up, which was on Halloween 2004. The guy was very intoxicated and both his girlfriends happened to show up to his costume party, and in the process of trying to keep them separated, he cracked his head on the bar lamp and wound up in my ER, dressed like Paris Hilton, with two big gashes and me sewing on his head. This guy, tonight? Apparently tried to murder his mother, was found incompetent to stand trial, and then just wound up on the wrong side of that chair. He was so much more pleasant and cooperative than the last fellow whose head I stitched.

After I dressed his wound, I sent him back up to his floor with an order for tylenol, and told him that next time, he really should duck.