Day shift. You and your partner are busy absorbing the “surge” of about ten major medical players that have arrived in the last twenty minutes...

A distraught elderly man brings his equally elderly wife to the ER on a Friday night for behavior problems. “I can’t do anything with her,” he says. Apparently she has been yelling at him for several days non-stop, and in the last 24 hours she has become physically abusive. 

Take off the collar?

 

When there is a mechanism of injury for C-spinefracture, don’t rely on plain films.

 

Is this an appendix, a ruptured cyst or something else?

Side impact injury

Motorcycle wrecks seem to be “in vogue” this year for the trauma service. This fellow was riding his  Harley out on the street, and was side-swiped by a car. 

It’s trauma season again. EMS brings you (with three minutes warning) a young male with a gunshot wound to the right flank.