“What is your name? Can you tell me your name?”
The first query that individuals are requested as they’re rushed into the emergency room at Mount Sinai Hospital is a ploy. The nurses and medical doctors hovering alongside the rolling gurney aren’t actually desirous about that. Not now, with life doubtlessly hanging within the steadiness. Besides, they in all probability might get the individual’s identify from a pockets within the bloody garments being stripped or reduce away.
What they actually need is to immediate the affected person to talk, or attempt to.
If they will, “That tells us they’re breathing fine and their lung sounds are clear because they can talk to us,” stated Raquel Prendkowski, emergency division director for Sinai Health System. “We want to see if they’re audible.”
Marco Munoz, introduced in on a latest heat Tuesday evening, can mumble his identify. But his left lung is just not clear because of the knife plunged into his chest 15 minutes earlier in Ok-Town.
Medical employees carry out their duties from particular positions across the mattress as they deal with a person with a stab wound at Mount Sinai Hospital.Ashlee Rezin Garcia / Sun-Times 120 sufferers a day
“I was supposed to take her to the zoo today. If I just would taken her to the zoo today. My baby….”
Sometimes, the huge, sq., low, windowless room is nearly quiet. Conversation hushed, machines pinging. Sometimes, the heartbreak is loud and unavoidable within the ER at Mount Sinai, the most important non-public safety-net well being system within the metropolis and considered one of its busiest Level 1 trauma facilities, seeing a median of 120 sufferers a day. Particularly the children: burnt, overwhelmed, shot or, on this case, struck and killed by a automotive. The first resonating peal in somebody’s lifetime of sorrow. Six years outdated.
“Those are the ones that stick with you,” Prendkowski says later. “We called in a counselor. My people were, like, ‘We’re OK. We need to debrief.’ I said, ‘With this one, I’m forcing you to go to the counselor. You sit back there for five minutes. If you have nothing to say, that’s fine. But I want you to just be with someone who can listen without judgment.’ ”
The employees tends first to the sufferers however then higher are likely to themselves, or they received’t final lengthy.
“You’re either a lifer here, or you do it for a few months, and it’s too much on your soul, and you have to find something else,” Prendkowski says. “But we have quite a few lifers here. I am.”
Her personal trauma was what introduced Prendkowski right here.
“I’ve been a nurse for 17 years now,” she says. “About three years ago — I share this because it doesn’t bother me anymore — I was beaten and stabbed for my phone. It made me want to be in the emergency department.”
So she transferred, considered one of quite a few emergency division workers dealing not solely with sufferers’ trauma but in addition their very own.
“The attitude is: ‘This happened bad to me, but I’m going to make it OK for someone else,’ ” Prendkowski says. “You see that a lot with our people. We have people whose sons or grandsons have been murdered, and they still work here.”
Nobody desires blood of their eyes
“What’s your ETA?”
“About five minutes.”
Despite the flat-screen pc monitor and all the know-how, phrase of individuals on their method to Mount Sinai nonetheless comes over a radio, sounding distorted and muddy. News of the stabbing of Munoz — his identify has been modified to guard his privateness — arrives shortly after eight p.m. An RN, pen in hand, listens exhausting, copying the stats onto a paper type.
“He originally started at 90, we got him to 100 percent…”
“Could you repeat those vitals for me?” he says.
Dr. Amarjit Singh, watching over his shoulder, reaches to press a button on the wall. A whirring alarm and a girl’s voice sound all through the hospital.
“Code yellow: Trauma in the emergency room.”
Surgeons start arriving within the ER from upstairs. Trays are rolled into No. 3. Bags…