Bloody Blunder

Don't go getting squeamish on me just yet-I promise I'll tone down the part that involves blood. (Btw-did you know how to spell squeamish? strange looking word isn't it?) I went in to work at 7:30 this morning with coffee in hand (not gonna make THAT mistake again) and a chipper attitude. I enjoy working with my Wednesday crew since they're pretty laid back and the crazies are limited because we only deal with one part of the body. When you come in and tell me your right shoulder, left elbow, between your shoulder blades on your back, lower back, right knee, and left big toe hurt....do you really expect me to take that person seriously? Ok then.

We have a ton of post-op patients which means I take out a million stitches and apply 3x as many steri strips. My doc typically likes to see patients back the day after surgery, ten days after surgery, and then a few follow up visits depending on what was done. Therefore, I have to rely on the date in the chart and the patient to make sure I know how far out they are. Most of you know we just started changing systems to eventually go all EMR [read MASS CONFUSION and the reason I feel the need to drink at 10am. speaking of which anyone have a rum cake recipe? we need a legit way to chill at work. they won't hand out adavan or let us bring flasks]. There's been a little issue with dictation getting backed up in the system so I have no heads up about the previous visit...this makes me look like a fool when I have to ask a few round about questions to find out why they're here and what the heck we did to them. It's easy to look at a fat bandage and know obviously that left wrist had some kind of problem...but when they walk in w/o a bandage period-well it gets tricky. I digress-

Ok let's set the scene. It's somewhere b/w 8:30 and 9:00am. Clinic is in full swing and I'm doing my thing. Routine deal. Patient comes in with massive bandage over wrist and hand. I see the surgery listed, glance at the date, and evaluate my next step. Well hello- suture removal, duh. I start talking to the patient and companion asking if everything has been ok since surgery and tell them I'm going to remove the stitches. They nod and are relaxed with this. I bring in suture kit, glance at his wrist, and start doing my thing. Stitches on his wrist come out w/o issue, but this guy also had another small operation done on his thumb so I'm looking at those stitches and thinking about the best angle to remove them. Suddenly my new friend decided to squeeze, open, and twist his palm...yeah...um this was a MAJOR problem. The incision burst open (imagine you just sliced your finger open and it's like the Dead Sea parted) and a trickle of blood appears. Oh no-it's ok- I got this. Gauze in hand and hold pressure for a minute. Bleeding continues...my doc happens to enter the room followed by his nurse. So awesome, my patient is bleeding and everyone knows now. Um about that trickle...see it never stopped and sorta turned into gushing. yeah...that's definitely a problem...

Come to find out the patient was 1 day post-op. Meaning the surgery was done the DAY BEFORE-as in 24 hours. We tried to steri strip him but nothing was holding Old Faithful down. He ended up having to restitch him which was not only annoying but slowed clinic down big time.

Ugh. My chipper mood went down the tube and all I could think was "please don't yell at me in front of people...please let this be over fast and I not screw up anything else this morning." Thankfully, both my doc and nurse are nice people and there was no yelling; this could have been because I was profusely apologizing about being a idiot. The nurse brushed it off, told me I wouldn't make that mistake again, and jokingly gave me a hard time the rest of the day. Irony of the situation- another MA had done the exact same thing the day before. The doc just shook his head and said he didn't know what was going on with all the new system changes but it was obviously giving us problems. I feel no shame in letting the EMR systems play the scape goat even though we all know I was just dumb haha.

I'll leave you with one final thought: you know it's been a rough day when you can't decide between chocolate and alcohol so you imbibe a little of both. I'll let you know how that works out later ;)