Another one bites the dust! Well, I finished my final shift in the ED today... I'm sad, but happy in another way. I had a lot of fun on this rotation, even if there isn't a residency program there. I saw a lot of people I hadn't seen in several years - which was nice - and met a lot of really cool people. That means the staff, not the patients.. Just kidding. The patients were typical ED patients: Some real patients with real problems, others real patients with what they think are real problems, and the others that are fake patients that make up problems to get something that they want.

Saw some really interesting stuff tonight, though. When I first arrived at the ED, the trauma team was working over this patient who had come in "all swollen up" after a fall a couple of days ago. I was working with GruntDoc tonight, and I'm sure he'll have pictures of the CT (cat scan for you non-medically savvy people) on his site in the next couple of days. Check it out - it was really cool. Basically, this guy had air under his skin all the way from his neck, down past his pelvis. Not a good thing!

Another cool patient I saw was a 40-something hispanic male who came in complaining of nausea, vomiting, and upper abdominal pain. That's not the cool part - what was so weird is that on his chest x-ray, his entire left lung is a series of bullae - bubbles formed (usually from emphysema or other lung pathology) within the lung tissue and surrounded by very thin walls of lung. Typically, you'll see a few of these in the lung. This guy, however, had his entire lung replaced by bullae, which was pushing his heart and other central vessels over into the other side of the chest. Strangely, this guy wasn't having difficulty breathing - especially since the other lung was full of bullae.

Ok.. I'm tired now. I'm going to bed so I can get up tomorrow and get ready to go to Pennsylvania for a month. I have a lot to do!  ¶ 5:29:00 AM