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Vice Blog

Scandinavia – Last Night at the ER

I recently had to get an emergency CAT scan because of some utterly boring condition I've had my whole life. I got talking to my doctor. He was really nice and a lot more blunt than I thought they were allowed to be.

Vice: So, do you have any stories?
Dr: Sure. There was this one time when the police dropped off a guy with a gunshot wound in his calf. Half an hour later the guy who had shot him arrived as well – the so-called hit man…

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He was probably quite inexperienced, because the bullet had passed through his own finger and then into the victim's calf. So, not only did the hit man fail miserably with the assassination, he also shot off his own index finger. Ha ha…

That sounds so unglamorous.
It is very unglamorous. Real life is nothing like the exciting TV shows. Another time there was this Yugoslav who had gotten shot straight in the chest. He had a big hole in his thorax, exactly above the heart. I thought, "This guy is fucked. He's dying for sure." But then I started talking to him and noticed that he responded and seemed totally untouched. The guy wasn't even in shock! I listened to his heart and lungs. His heartbeat and breathing was normal. So we did an x-ray, and that's when we became aware that there was no exit wound. But the strange thing was that he didn't have a bullet in his chest either. We could see that the bullet had pierced the right lung. But that's all we could see. The fucking bullet was gone without a trace. Several days later the patient complained about a pain in his right elbow. We did another x-ray and found the bullet in his right elbow. The bullet had passed through his thorax, through his lung and out, down along his arm, all the way down to his elbow. Odd, right?

Yes, that is odd.
I had another incident that was weird. It was a stabbing during one of my first calls as a surgeon. It was a stabbed biker coming in. "Massive lung-bleeding through the mouth, incoming in two minutes" sounded the alarm.

Ew!
That's exactly what I thought! And then he comes in. He's bleeding like hell through the mouth. I listen to his lungs. Everything is in order. No piercing wounds in his lungs. And yet the blood was gushing from his mouth. The stab wound was in his back. He was bleeding a lot. We probed the insert wound and realized the stab went into his ribs, not his lungs.

So what had happened?
Well, it turns out he had gotten an acute stress-related ulcer. He was bleeding from his stomach. The guy had been stabbed and got so worked up about it that he produced a fucking acute ulcer. His stomach was bleeding worse than his stab wound.

Ok thanks. I'm going back to my bunk now.
Ok, bye.