I am the Trauma Queen

For any of you that ever thought they were a "black cloud" aka shit magnet...I am your match. From the first time I ever laid my hands on a trauma pager, it was done. The ER would be peaceful and calm, and then I would grab my stuff and let the trouble commence.

I used to try and not touch the pager for as long as possible. I would let it lay on the table in front of me, until I HAD to get up and go see a patient. It was like a challenge! "will it wait till I touch it today?" and sadly, most days, it did.

So I started honing my "gut" into how my night was going to go. Yes, I know what you are thinking, trauma is unpredictable, but, there were a few patterns that I just couldn't ignore. Mondays are always the worst, maybe its a East coast thing? My worst nights in the bay, have been on Monday nights. Next, is there a sporting event near by? Cause when I lived in NC near the speedway, do you know how many drunk people fall of their campers? Alot. How is the weather outside? If it just snowed, and the fools around me aren't used to it, should I call out sick? How about the full moon? Do you know that a few MD's actually did a study that showed hospital activity doesn't increase or change around a full moon...I say, go back to your cubicle!!

So, I use all these things to get a gauge on the evening. I also use trauma juju. Laugh if you may. I generally will not let anyone wish me a "good night at work" before a night at work. If they do, I'm guaranteed a night from hell. Don't say "quite" EVER when at work. If it's quite, you be quite too. When someone says, "oh, this is going to be an easy night" I cringe, and promptly remind them they are my trauma backup. I don't ever sit on the trauma stretcher anymore waiting for the pt to arrive. I try and head off anything that could cause the night to go downhill.

That being said, does it always work? No, but for the most part I feel better about going in to it most days. When I was in NC, I had an incident where I had 26 intubated traumas in one night. They were all separate issues (except for the last 3, they were the same car). This was not 26 from a mass casualty or anything like that. This was 26 people of my black cloud hell. It came out to be roughly 2.1 intubations an hour.

My current hospital gets a small taste of this everyday. I can literally, take the ER calm as a clam and make it ground zero. I walked in to the hospital a few months ago and said to the night supervisor, "I have a bad feeling about tonight" He was like, "why would you say that?!" and I said, "my gut is never wrong" Sure enough, I hit the ground running 10 mins later and didn't look back until 0700.

Some nights are better than others, but I love what I do. I am the trauma Queen, and until someone can beat my 26 single injury intubated traumas, I will keep my crown. My gut never lies, too bad they didn't teach me that in Respiratory school.