Code Blues Read Online Free PDF Page A

Along
three walls surrounding the nursing station, blue-gowned patients
sat in beds or rooms clearly labeled from one to 14, and more
patients lay stretched out on beds beside the station and along the
wall.
    I took a cautious sniff. People often
complain about the smell of hospitals, but unless it's bloody
stool, pus, or a newly-disinfected room, I don't notice much
anymore. St. Joe's smelled fine to me.
    I walked up to a nurse with snapping brown
eyes and a big smile. She looked to be about my age, and although
she was wearing pink scrub pants, she had a blue and brown striped
top. I said, "Hi, I'm Hope. This is my first day here."
    She shook my hand. She had quick, bird-like
movements. "I'm Roxanne. Let me show you the residents' room." From
the windowsill, she plucked a two-foot long yellow stick with a key
dangling from the end of it. It looked like a potential weapon. I
stared. She laughed. "That's so we don't lose it."
    Behind the nursing station, she showed me a
small hallway with a kitchen, a bathroom, a conference room, and
two little call rooms, one for the residents and one for the staff
doctors. "The staff one has a shower. Yours is the one on the left.
Have fun."
    I shed my bag in the residents' room, which
was a basic white box with a bed, a desk, and a few hooks for
jackets. I wound my stethoscope around my neck and jammed a pen, a
pharmacopoeia, and my trusty navy notebook into my pockets. It was
just past 7:30.
    Dr. Callendar turned out to be one of the
guys I'd passed at the desk when I came in. I now knew that this
was the ambulatory side of the emerg. Dr. Callendar looked
fifty-something, with a black crew cut, beat-up Nikes, and a white
coat over his greens. When I plopped into a chair beside him, he
kept on writing a note on a brown clipboard.
    After a full minute, without looking up or
putting down his Bic pen, he grunted, "Who are you."
    "Hi, my name is Hope Sze, I'm a first-year
resident, and this is my first emergency shift—"
    He glanced up, wearing extra wrinkles across
his forehead. His nose was too blunt-tipped and his lips too thin
for him to be handsome "You got oriented?"
    Not really. "Well, we walked through the ER
yesterday—"
    He handed me a clipboard. "Start seeing
patients."
    Automatically, I took the clipboard, but my
brain had stalled out. As a medical student, they took pains to
orient me and make sure I was comfortable before I worked. As a
first year resident, a.k.a. an R1, it was obviously sink or swim.
Not to mention the fact that Alex told me my shift didn't really
start until 8 a.m., so I was here voluntarily early.
    Dr. Callendar had already turned back to his
chart. I took meager comfort in his stereotypically atrocious
handwriting. While I watched, he grabbed a giant rubber stamp,
pressed it in a blue inkpad, and stamped his chart with headings
for a complete history and physical, from "ID" to "Extremities" on
his chart. At least that was legible.
    I glanced at my own chart. A twenty-year-old
woman, six years younger than me, who'd complained of burning,
frequent urination. It sounded pretty straightforward. The triage
nurse had even written, "Feels like UTI," or urinary tract
infection. Still, it was cool to knock on the door of room 2 and
introduce myself as Dr. Hope Sze for the first time.
    By the time I returned, Dr. Callendar had
disappeared. All that remained of him was his rubber stamp. I found
him in the nursing station, rifling through green slips of paper.
He scowled at me, and shoved them in the pocket of his lab coat,
but not before I saw the patient names and numbers printed on the
slips. He was doing his billing for the night shift.
    I pretended not to notice. "Dr. Callendar,
did you want to review the UTI before I send her home?"
    "Of course!" he snapped. "All your patients
have to be reviewed. You're a resident!"
    Thanks for sharing. And then he went on to
share some more. Did I ask about risk factors? Was she sexually
active? Had she had UTI's in the past?