lightning rounds

by: poppyseed

Wed Jun 17, 2009 at 13:17:35 PM PDT

quick post this time. sitting at clinic waiting for the nurses to take vitals and shove the patients into their rooms for the afternoon. there's this big white board i can peek at from here; they just write the room numbers-- no names. we cross them off as we see them, empty the rooms as we finish, and the nurses fill them back up again and write the numbers. it's gonna be a dead run from here on in. but we've been running like that since this morning.

poppyseed :: lightning rounds

got paged out of my fugue state of charting and checking and charting again to run up four flights of stairs and stand at attention: attending rounds. spent the next hour flying by patient after patient, babbling in our telegraphic doctor where the only breaks in the incomprehensible nonsense are these terrible, terrible words "... gonna die anyway...incontinence...sitting on a vent forever... just gonna bleed and bleed and bleed" and then we duck in the room and surround the bed. the conversation continues unchanged-- someone drones through a set of numbers, someone else snaps on a glove, flips down the sheet, and starts poking at the belly that has suddenly appeared for our appraisal. there is primate social posturing-- a rebuke, flattery, scorn, retreat. meanwhile i'm grabbing at gloves, tugging at curtains, zooming out of the room for gauze or scissors or a surgical consent, translating the storm of verbiage into something human (and usually horrifying-- we are going to make a hole in you, you could bleed a lot, there is the possibility that you will wake up with tubes coming out of all over you) and trailing out of the room, sucked by the tide of the retreating team, pulled away from the lonely stranger in the bed with all these questions in his eyes.

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What is health justice? How are health & human rights fiercely connected to the wellness of our neighborhoods? How do we reframe policy debates? How do we continue dreaming and building instead of just reacting & surviving? And how do we support each other in our healing?

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