"Well, keep on your toes," Brad commented without lifting his eyes from his computer screen. He was responsible for a lot of the record keeping, especially with the insurance providers. When I first started volunteering at the ER, I wondered why he kept a bottle of eye drops next to his keyboard all the time. After helping him out one shift, I stopped wondering. I had glowing letters dancing in front of my eyes the whole rest of my night. How Brad put up with it, I didn't fathom to guess. "Doc Green is coming in today at noon."
I rolled my eyes. "Green. Well, I guess I could expect it. But why noon? He's normally on morning shift."
"He was in late last night," Cassandra said, a grin on her face. "He was supposed to be out of here at midnight and back in for first shift today."
"So what happened?" I asked, finishing off the last of my energy drink and tossing the empty can into the recycle bin. "I've heard he could pull a shift like that no problem at all."
"The problem is, ten minutes after his shift was technically over, and he was finishing up his paperwork, the ambulance brought in a bleeder," Brad interjected. "From your part of town, even. A loan shark for the Russians, Karl Vaslov. Apparently he was sitting in his living room last night watching The Daily Show or something when somebody kicked in his door and attacked. He came in with a laundry list of internal injuries, along with his tongue being cut out. He was pretty much DOA, but wasn't clinically dead yet, so Green had to spend another three hours working on him. Vaslov finally coded out at three thirty this morning, and Green got out of here about four thirty."
"Huh. Well, I guess I’ll take the small favors created by the death of a criminal," I replied, wiping my eyes. I caught one piece of crusty eye gunk that I'd missed earlier, the scratchy little bit scraping my cheekbone as I worked it out. "I'm only on until two today, and I've got a shift at the Shamrock this evening. Any chance to get work done without Green around is good for me."
One of the attending physicians, Dr. Morrison, dropped off a chart with a laugh. "Face it, Sophie, if it wasn't for Green, work here would be very boring for you."
I half yawned, half laughed and pulled on my short jacket that showed I was a volunteer assistant on top of my scrubs. "True, Doctor. But I think I'd rather have boring shifts than entertaining ones."
Morrison nodded and grabbed the next chart in the line off the wall. "That's fine. Okay, let's see, I've got you down for health clinic duty starting at ten, but until then stick close. You've been working on your sutures a lot lately I noticed, I might just let you try them out on a real human today."
I liked Morrison. He was in his mid-forties and ugly as sin, but a nice guy. He had even had me over to his house along with a bunch of the other volunteers and med students the summer before for a barbecue, and I was able to spend three hours hanging out with his teenage daughter, who thankfully looked nothing at all like her father. "Thanks, Doc. I promise, I won't sew my fingers to anyone's scalp today."
Morrison nodded. "Better not, or else I'm just going to leave them there. Come on, Mrs. Wong in exam two isn't going to like waiting much longer."
The first three hours of my shift went well, and at ten, I headed over to the community health clinic. A partnership with a local charity, it was a huge tax write-off for both the hospital and the corporation behind the charity. The clinic provided low-cost community health care for the local area, and often gave away services to those who couldn't pay for them.
While noble in nature, the reality was I spent a lot of my time wiping stuffy noses and trying to explain to woefully unprepared, uneducated and uninterested parents that feeding your child real food from the supermarket instead of fast food and convenience store stuff would go a long way towards some of the problems they kept bringing their kids in for.
Their kids didn't need pills for their cold, they needed fresh oranges. Their anemic child would be a lot better off with some spinach or kale with their dinner instead of coming in for shots. Sadly, most of my lectures got nasty looks from parents, and not a week went by without someone loudly stating that I had a lot of nerve trying to tell her how to raise her children.
But today was vaccination day, so I got to give my right thumb a good workout. As I was sticking dose after dose of measles vaccine into little kids' backsides, I reflected that at least the clinic didn't have to deal with the affluent parents some of the private doctors did. I don't think I could have dealt with any soccer moms whipping out blog posts from anti-vax websites and trying to trip me up with 'facts' from Jenny McCarthy. We didn't get that sort of parent in the clinic. I suppose it was just trading one type of headache parent for another.