The Awristocrats of Whidbey Island

After some jet setting down to Portland and thoroughly enjoying my mainland time, it was back to the island for me. Left the big city at 6am, battled Sea-Tac traffic squirming in my sweaty leather seat of my no AC-working Mazda as the blazing sun was reminding me that a Noon O'clock start in the ER was going to be a push. A ferry ride full of Euros later, I made it to the ER w/ 3 minutes to spare.

Apparently, a thunder storm hit Portland when I left. But I entered my own storm, of a nature previously not witnessed. It was the Great Wrist Storm of 2009. While brief, it was intense, and in a matter of 2 hours, we were in a deluge of displaced carpals, distal ulnas, and comminuted radii. We had 8 wrist injuries in this time. That is a lot for a 13 bed ER on an island of only 10,000 wrists. (and remember all except the saltiest of sailors up here, have two each)

11 yo boy fell skatebording
9 yo boy fell walking backwards
72 yo lady fell while slipping on a rock
10 yo boy tackled at school
19 yo girl wrist vs. knife in a brownie pan incident
17 yo guy boxer's fracture
44 yo I don't even know what happened to her (I can only keep up for so long)
18 yo wrist vs brick (that happened to be on the ground which happened to be adjacent to a trampoline which happens to be bouncy and happens to toss children and adults off with very little discrimination)

When I walked into the Fast Track area, there was a guy on the left with a right wrist injury and a guy on the right with a left wrist injury. I was hearing words like Monteggia and Galeazzi being thrown around. I heard at least 4 providers provide mnemonics for remembering the carpal bones. When the clouds cleared and last wrist was discharged, we surveyed the damage: We ran out of air splints. We're down to the 8 inch ACE wraps. Ortho is still on hold for that one guy. But we never ran out of Vicodin. No, we will never run out of Vicodin.

Library is closing. I went to an Ultrasound training session today, so almost normal hours for me. Now they are kicking me out, so gotta run back into the Internetless world. Miss you all!