Day #14. - The doctor stories.

Story #1. There was a 24 year old patient who was brought in from a jail in a rural county. He was working roadside cleanup when he found a bottle in a ditch that he thought contained alcohol and he quickly chugged it down. To be fair it did look like whiskey. It turns out it was a substance that contained sulfuric acid. Its pH was less than 2.5 it just ate up the litmus paper. So shortly after he gets to the ICU he is in excruciating pain and vomiting blood. The gastroenterologist took him to do an EGD (basically a procedure where they can look at the esophagus, stomach and duodenum with a camera attached to a flexible tube) and the pictures were horrendous. You could literally see his stomach and esophageal mucosa eroding away. He had to be sent off to another hospital where they had an esophageal surgeon who could repair the mess. He of course needed multiple surgeries and had a very long hospital stay. I saw him a few months later when he was admitted for another issue. He was down to 90 lbs (from about 150) and was getting fed through a PEG tube. Story #2 -. The doctor, another nurse, and I are sitting in a delivery room watching this chick's snatch vomit up a baby. I've seen this several times before. Anyway, the head was crowning and the dad (who had been there the entire time comforting his wife) is just hunkered down watching this baby be born while holding his wife's hand. The first baby is out. It's a girl. He nods and keeps watching. Second baby is out, also a girl. He nods. After we let the mom hold the girls we took them to the nursery while the mom got situated. Dad disappeared. I didn't see him for another hour and a half. I decided to pass by the nursery to take a look at the twins I helped deliver. The dad was standing there with this really weird look on his face. I asked him if he was okay, and he said, "Yeah. Looks like I'm a dad now." and then burst into some really heavy sobs. But he quit just as fast as he started and his expression changed to that of pure, unbridled joy. He apologized and then told me he was so excited to know who his little girls were going to be.