ER: Twelfth Day

Another 4 a.m. shift today. Seriously, all this switching back and forth has thrown my sleep cycle out of whack. It was a relatively slow morning, as they usually are. There are an awful lot of fast track patients presenting with cough, fever, and body aches; Dr. L, who says she usually goes overboard with prescribing antibiotics, did pretty well today in writing scripts for mostly cough syrup and telling the patients that their illness is viral. We had one patient, a middle-aged man, come in with a long history of cough and he asked us if it was possible he had lung cancer. He'd been retiling his floors in a 50-year-old house and thinks they might have asbestos in them. "Here, look," he said, fishing pieces of a tile out of his jacket and showing it to us. Needless to say I started wondering myself whether or not there was asbestos in that tile, but Dr. L assured him that asbestos doesn't cause cancer unless the patient is exposed to it over long periods of time. After he left, Justin the scribe joked that now he feels like coughing. Dr. L agreed, saying it was the same after seeing scabies patients; suddenly you feel itchy.