what a day. participated in a major hospital's mass casualty exercise this afternoon to simulate a bomb and sarin gas attack at a major subway station. we "volunteers" were told to pick a card and the one i got labeled me as a p1 patient with a fractured right femur with head injury, bp 80/60 (can't really be sure about this) pr 120/min rr 6/min gsc 13. i was sped to the hospital in an ambulance (first time in one), and there i waited for a while before the hazmat team took over. was pushed to the decon area then wheeled along the corridor and into the resus (correct?) room. a team of doctors and nurses stood over me. they read my card, hooked me up to the machines, "intubated" me, and decided if i should get a head/cervical CT. i'm not very sure what happened in the intervening period, but my next stop was the ICU, where i was again hooked up to the machines and left alone for two hours. fell asleep for awhile, and the chatty ICU nurses kindly turned down the lights. eventually got a call from missy-c who exclaimed that everyone was back at the reporting area and was i still a patient?! indeed i was, and i've got this feeling my gsc should have been about 5 by then. haha. so i peeled off the electrodes and tags and discharged myself.

so there. my first, and hopefully only, time that i'll get to stare at the ceilings of the er and ICU. other peeps got interesting stuff, like ms lion who actually screamed and behaved like the five-year-old boy she was supposed to be. me, i was asked my name several times, then some nurse would remind everyone i was supposed to be intubated. hilarious. but i've realised that it's awfully lonely to be lying in a hospital bed and unable to move, and that it's a terrible feeling to be lying in that stretcher, being pushed for miles down a corridor and be in pain and have the emergency staff yelling instructions at one another. you're stuck, strapped down onto the gurney by a tangle of wires, and helpless in the chaos.

what a fitting end to my pre-clinical education ain't it? clinics begin next week, and innocence shall fly out the window. heh.