Medicine Rotation

One of the rotations as an intern was on Internal Medicine and many of the admissions are the chronically ill and dying. When on call especially at night it is not unusual to have patients that are admitted “in extremis” so the ER physician doesn’t have to write up the death…. avoiding the paper work. Usually they call the floor and say a patient is being sent up and the charge nurse summons an intern to do the admission. Once admitted, if the patient dies than the intern on the floor would do the paper work. Late one night I was already on the ward sitting at the nurses station doing some charting and I heard the elevator door open and out rolled a gurney with a patient. As I glanced up, I saw a person push the cart and quickly duck back in the elevator. Slowly the cart rolled across the space from the elevator and bumped against the nurses station counter. I got up and saw a shroud draped body with a chart on it’s chest.
What had happened was one of the ER docs was trying to put a dead patient on my floor as an admission so I would have to write it up. I immediately knew who it was (Henri) and I called the elevator back up and took the body back down and pushed it out into the ER. This game went on taking the body for several up and down trips until the prankster finally gave up. This may sound macabre but knowing the situation and the person this became a much repeated story around the hospital. Luckily Dr Sinkler didn’t find out at least we don’t think so.
Another time a morbidly obese woman was admitted for seizures and just as she got to the floor with her family and the ER orderly had left, she seized again and toppled off the cart. At that very moment the lights on that end of the hospital went out. I was there with only a nurse who weighed probably no more than a 100 lbs.
She quickly got a flash light and we pulled a screen around the patient on the floor and shooed the family away.
I whispered that we would roll her on a sheet and pull her down the hall to a room until we had light to examine her. Just as we started to drag her down the hall the light came back on. The family standing there aghast.
Dr Sinkler called me on the carpet and threatened to dock my pay.
I told him I couldn’t think of anything else to do. He said what ever else I did would have been better than the family seeing her dragged down the hall.
Later the nurse and I over drinks laughed until we were in tears recalling what had happened that night.
What was humor to us may be considered disrespect by others. But these things got us through some trying times.
And when working the floor on medicine at night if you complained that the ER docs were dumping patients be prepared for an onslaught.
I met some super smart guys who could manage a case when awaken from a stupor. One was Joe H who once mumbled to a friend of mine what dose of digitalis to give IV to an OB patient dying from heart failure and promptly fell back to sleep….but the therapy saved her.