(alarm buzzing)
(gentle music)
- Just got up.
It's a little bit after 5 a.m.
I'm gonna get ready to go to hospital
where I will be for the next 24 hours or so
as the Chief Resident covering trauma surgery today.
We have a tradition that the Chief Resident
coming in for a 24 hour shift usually picks up coffee
for the team coming off of a 24 hour shift
from the night before.
(soothing music)
So this is one of the on-call rooms
that the surgery residents have in the hospital.
This call room is just for
the trauma surgery Chief Resident.
So that is me this month.
We have all these lockers from other people
who are passing through.
We hand down all kinds of old textbooks.
I don't even know why we have organic chemistry here,
but we have a bunch of older surgical books.
We've got this actually really cool,
actually cool surgical textbook
on surgery with considerations
for the military trauma population.
Usually in trauma we don't really get to sleep that much,
but sometimes you get a couple minutes
during your 24-hour shift to just put your feet up
and just catch your breath for a few minutes.
I always start off my day when I'm on trauma call
with a million pens in my pocket because
I always end up losing pens throughout the day.
So, there's always that.
Let's see, I got Field Notes.
I am not being paid to sponsor them,
but I love these notebooks because they're really tiny.
I can just wear them in my pocket,
take notes on new traumas as they're coming through
and kind of keep track of everything.
And let's see, two things that every trauma surgery resident
always keeps in their pocket.
One, is a 14 gauge IV in case someone comes in
with a pneumothorax and you have to decompress their chest.
The quickest way to do it is you stick the IV
in the second intercostal space
and then you can put a chest tube in
within the next couple minutes.
And I always walk around with an 11 blade scalpel.
Again, in case you're in an emergency situation
and you have to place a surgical airway as a cric,
you always want to be able to have this handy.
So always walk around with it in my pocket already.
Good morning.
So, that was the start of my day.
Now, the way the rest of the day works
is that in the morning between the hours of 6 and 7 a.m.
the whole team sees each of the patients and examines them
and then comes back together.
Then we meet with all of the attending surgeons
and go over the plans and discuss them.
And then the attending surgeon who is on call for the day
rounds with the Chief Resident and the rest of the team
and re-examines all of the patients together,
and we make sure that plans are being carried out
and that we haven't missed anything
and that nothing new has developed in the meantime.
And then during that period of time,
any new traumas that are coming into the hospital
that come to the ER get paged out to the hospital
and activated as a trauma.
And that means that our team gets alerted.
We rush down to the emergency room,
and we take care of the trauma however we need.
So, that may mean sending the patient to CAT scan
to find out what injuries they have,
or if the patient is really unstable
and needs to be rushed to the operating room,
immediately we do that.
And sometimes in the most extreme scenarios
the patient is without a pulse,
and we have to do procedures in the emergency room
to try to get the pulse back.
Everything from doing chest compressions
to as extreme as making an incision, opening the chest,
and doing what we call open cardiac massage
and cross-clamping the aorta.
That is something that's called a ED thoracotomy
or an emergency room thoracotomy.
So guys, here's the challenge.
I want to show you as much as I can about what life is like
as a surgery resident, but I obviously can't video tape
everything that I'm doing in the hospital.
So, I have some creative ideas about things to show
and ways that I can kind of communicate what we do,
but if you have any ideas or if you have any questions
about things that you'd like to see,
I'd love to hear in the comment section below.
So that's it for now, and I can't wait
to see you guys in the next video.
(calm music)