When you arrive at an ER (one that isn’t overwhelmed with cases like those on TV always are) on a gurney being pushed by paramedics you go right to a treatment area. The ER at Delaware is currently being rebuilt from scratch, so we went into the old treatment area. It’s not huge, and there are no separate treatment room, just roughly 8 foot by foot curtained off areas. I was immediately put into one, and a tech and a nurse came over and started seeing what was going on and taking my history. I think Hilary was out front registering me.
I clearly didn’t have a badly broken leg, but the swelling and physical exam indicated that maybe something was chipped or broken on my patella. I mentioned I couldn’t move my right leg below the knee and I’m sure it was noted, but my comment rang no bells. The patella fixation was firmly in place and would remain in place for weeks.
An aide rolls me over to internal x-ray right in the ER, where a pair of very gentle, very competent, and very kind techs take and develope 3 or 4 shots of my knee. The process was painless, including the positioning and moving.
Digression: The x-ray process is not always so nice. While in high school I dislocated the middle finger of my right hand playing football, and because of the extreme swelling an x-ray was ordered. The x-ray techs spent a very long time positioning my hand with small sandbags. It took seemingly forever and I was left with a wrist that hurt as much as the finger. The corker was the x-rays were so blurry that it was impossible to tell whether I had a hairline fracture or not.
So the Delco x-ray techs were great!
Back to my assigned cubie. A nice young resident comes in and shows me a couple of the films. There are dark spots at each upper corner of the patella. These may be normal or they may be chips. There’s enough pain to blur the issue and x-rays can’t show everything (something I was to learn way too much about in the next few months). He gives me two Percocets and a cup of water, and gets a knee immobilizer, which he proceeds to put on. As he’s putting it on I understand why he gave me the Percocets first. Then an orderly comes over with a pair of crutches which he sizes for me and helps me up onto. I get some advice, some demonstration, and two sheets of how to use crutches instructions.
From the first it’s obvious I’m a klutz on crutches.
Comments