Simple pleasures

Obtaining a urine specimen from a very small child can be a bit of a waiting game. You give the parents a pot/bowl and instruct them to undo the nappy and wait, they look at you a little bit strangely but you explain that's the only way to do it and then the game begins.

This morning we had a fairly sick child that we needed a specimen from. We waited, and we waited and we waited. Nada. The child had been sick that morning and not drank much so I thought it would be a good idea to give her a some water to try and get things going. Three minutes later dad stands her up on the floor whislt he rummages in a bag, she promtly begins to wee a little puddle on the floor.
"Quick dad, quick! The bowl!" I cry excitedly.
Dad fumbles around looking for the bowl and no sooner than he has it in his grasp the little girl stops weeing. Doh! Dad and I look at eachother comiseration and lo and behold she starts up again, we get our sample, hurray. Such pleasure from such a simple thing.

Please if you are invovled in a fight be honest about your injuries and method of injury, we're not trying to get you into trouble, it's important for us to be able to assess you correctly. Sitting there non-compliantly grunting "No" and "Just me" doesn't help. Particularly when we know it couldn't just have been you there as you've already admitted to someone punching you in the face and have a mark to proove it.

We had a child in resus this morning in status epilepticus (a seizure that continues for more than 30 minutes, or more than one seizure without recovery in between), I was there to observe and lend a hand if possible. Generally my lending a hand involved passing things, holding limbs for cannulation and documenting observations. This morning, however, I had to explain the IV drug calculation to two qualified nurses when they got a bit stuck. I knew I'd done it correctly, but I'd not eaten since I'd got up almost 4 hours previously and my brain seized up a bit when I tried to explain how I'd done it. I've always been good at maths, it comes naturally, my mother was a maths teacher and I think it was passed via the placenta. However the downside to that is it is difficult to explain soemthing that you "just know" to someone else who doesn't "just know".

There are so many things I could Blog about, I see so many patients in the space of a day that are interesting in some way or another, though perhaps not to my readers! The other effect of seeing so many people is the distortion of time, or my perception of it. The little girl with the urine sample for instance; that excitement happened around 11am, less than 12 hours ago as I write this, yet it feels like days ago.

Oh, and we had laods of really cute (crying) children today. Like the one who fell 8 stairs down onto a concrete floor and had a beautiful swollen, black eye, or that one that pushed a bead into her ear and sobbed as we tried (unsuccessfully) to remove it.