First of the Month

The first of the month is one of the most intense times in the ER. Everyone in the city in poverty gets their well fare checks. Drug dealers, addicts, and families all get a pay check that is suppose to last them the month. The enitre city becomes one big party, the streets are filled with people. Everyone is out front of the barber shops dealing drugs in broad day light on the cities main streets. Working the night shift we get the aftermath of the party, or as we like to call it the late night after party. The night was busy the moment I walked in the door, the place is packed with people. All beds are full and patients in beds line the halls. The corner is always packed to max capacity the first week of the month. Beds eight through thirteen are the beds that make up this corner, along with two more beds that are both called eleven, (eleven isolation and eleven observation). Needless to say that on this night the crisis patients are getting backed up all the way up to bed five. After bed eight the rest of the hospital beds become what I like to call normal functioning society beds. Beds where families are seeing their dying grandmother or someone just trying to found out why he is having chest pain, after smoking for twenty five years. When it is this backed up it starts to effect the other patients. People who are already having an issue are now scared to death. People are wondering if the patient high on PCP a bed over will break out of their restraints and start terrorizing the place. Which has happened, but thats another story.

About an hour into my shift and we get a patient who is overdosed on crack and heroin. Police found her underneath of a parked taxicab and called EMS. She was given two doeses of Narcan. Narcan is a drug that blocks the opiet receptors. She looked like she could be a mom and a family woman. But now just another junkie on the streets. I often wonder what could cause someone to get to that point in their life. We get her off of the EMS stretcher and on to our own bed, immediatly we have to restrain her to the bed. The down side of Narcan is that the patient is usually violent because we have killed their high. Because of the effects of the two different drugs, the patient would go from screaming and trying to hit everyone in sight to falling asleep in the snap of a finger. In the middle of restraining her we are getting her undressed and into a gown. In the mix of all of this chaos, while getting her pants off, I could not believe what I saw. A broken crack pipe had fallen out of her annus, I couldn't believe it!

As the night goes on the effects of the two drugs are causing this woman to scream at the top of her lungs, fall sound asleep, this is being repeated throughout the night. Across the hall is a patient who has overdosed off of Seroquel, this patient is also restrained. A male middle aged patient who is also screaming at the top of his lungs because he has just had his stomach pumped and filled with activated charcoal through an NG tube is in the other bed. The whole ER sounds like an insane assylum, normal patients are getting a little freaked out. To top it all off there is a patient who is withdrawing off of Heroin in the crisis corner, who has been sleeping all night, jumps up with a fury out of his bed and screams at the top of his lungs " EVERYONE JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!!". Sometimes this place seems more like a nut house instead of a hospital.