My first weekend on call. From Friday afternoon untill Monday morning, around the clock, no back-up, no supervision. Quite scary, but luckily I had my friend Andrea to keep me company. Andrea is a medical student in her final year, and convinced about her future choice of specialization: obstetrics and gynaecology.
Our first call of the night was a stab-wound in the back and face. Stab-wounds are quite common in these areas, people tend to get very drunk and then fight with eachother. Their favourite means of hurting eachother is a knife. This also has to do with poverty, since a knife is cheap, and a gun is quite expensive. Hence the stabbings. As Andrea started to suture the first stabbed victim, the second one came in, correction: was dragged in by a security guard, obviously very drunk. He also got stabbed, and in a pretty particular place: his balls. As I was trying to look at the damage, he was falling asleep on the examination table. The moment I stuck a needle into his private parts, the snoring was over obviously. With some help of 3 men to prevent the drunk guy from kicking me in the face, I did manage to suture the 3 holes and stop the bleeding, but I would have loved to have seen the expression on his face after he had sobered up, since he didn’t really seem to notice what was going on at the time. Andrea was quite pleased with the whole situation, and, I must admit, it was quite peculiar indeed. As I was about to finish the stabbed balls, a 21 year old lady came in, beaten up all over her body, with a swollen face. As a was about to examine her, two other emergencies came in, that needed our immediate attention. It wasn’t untill 3.30 am that we could rest our bodies. After all this excitement, the rest of the weekend was quite uninteresting and even a bit boring. The reason for this must have been that the weather suddenly turned quite bad, as in, cold and windy. Apparently bad weather to fall ill or to start a stabbing-party. So, Andrea and I managed to discover some talents we never knew we possessed: baking bread and making apple-pie. Plus watching Sex and the City time 27. It was fun.
Nevertheless, the hero of the weekend was a 13 year old boy who had been kicked by a horse on the head, and sustained a 15 cm cut on his head. With the skin hanging down, the complete skull was visible. His mother was about to faint, but the boy behaved like a real man all the way through me suturing him. And he hadn’t even been circumsized yet.
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