Review: Saving someone's life

Saving someone's life. That's an odd thing to review, but until today I'd never realized how much I've done that in the past few months.

See, the hospital I work at has two campuses, both with emergency rooms. In the past, I worked on the west bank of the river, and over there the patients are primarily mental health or cold symptoms. Generally, when you're dealing with mental health patients as a registrar, you get nothing but attitude from a whiney kid that expects special treatment because his/her parents are divorced and he/she doesn't like mom's new boyfriend. Sometimes girlfriend up here. Or you get tons of homeless people during the winter that know if they claim suicidal ideas, they get 72 hours worth of warmth and free meals, all on my dollar. Needless to say, it's easy to build up a level of cynicism.

Especially when you're like me. Parents divorced. Never liked dad's new girlfriend. Worst I ever did was run away once. I got about a mile down the road. Consider also that several of my closest friends deal with some of the serious stuff that most people seek psychiatrists and anti-depressants over, yet none of us even remotely consider such things as viable treatment (we just suck it up and get on with life, sometimes a good Watchdogs pep talk is needed, but that's the worst of it). Mental health isn't the best of fields for me.

However, the east bank campus is vastly different. Rarely is a mental health patient seen here. Still enough cold symptoms to feel my limit of tolerance for welfare abuse, but that's any ER I think. No, at this campus, we're associated with the state university, and we're one of the world's leaders in transplants and very respected for cancer treatment and cardiac care. Here, there's an obvious result in a job well done. People live. Not only do they live, but they don't come back three days later with the exact same story.

So, today a patient was brought in only semi-concsious and severely wheezing. A caretaker was with him, but couldn't identify a specific problem as the patient was non-responsive. With nothing more than a name and birthday, I got the patient registered and ready to go before the doctor/nurses had him in a bed. With no medical history, they didn't have much to go on, but I was able to find that for them right away. Good thing, too. He had an allergy to a usual treatment for cardiac arrest. We managed to save him, bring his heart rate back to normal and prevent the normal bad things that go along with serious heart attacks. That's a good feeling.

They could have done it all had I not expedited my end of the process. My end only deals with billing and insurance. The only thing they need from me is some numbers in the computer so labs and things can be ordered, but by getting that done quickly, I let the care givers focus on taking care of the patient, instead of worrying about whether the lab and Xray know they may be needed. I let the HUCs focus on securing on call doctors or specialists. I get the nurses the labels they need so the patient's records and/or blood work doesn't get mixed up with another's. I may not save his life, but I make it easier for the people that can to do it.

I hadn't realized all of that until the doctor and the HUC (health unit coordinator) thanked me. Usually the doctors don't bother with the registrars. We normally fly under their radar. But when the doc said thanks, and I said "no big," he stopped to let me know how much getting the job done quickly really helped. He outlined all of the above. I take a considerable amount of pride in being the fastest registrar on our team. It's nice to see it does make a difference.