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09.14.09 - 11:55 p.m. After my last shift, I got into my car and tried to figure out where the beeping was coming from. Ah. The phone. In my pocket. That needs to be passed off to my replacement. I was only halfway home, so I turned around, parked with my flashers on in front of the valet types, and ran in quickly to drop off the phone in question. I found my replacement in the resuscitation bay. A smaller than usual pale white foot protruded from a crowd of white coats and scrubs. It was a ten year old boy hit by a car. The white foot said it all. In my twenty seconds there, I also saw the chest compressions and heard someone call out the fixed and dilated pupils. But white hands and feet (this is white like a piece of notebook paper or fresh snow, it is unmistakably bad)mean no blood. Blunt trauma with no vital signs means all the blood is sloshing around loose in the belly or the pelvis, and those patients stay dead no matter what you do. And these are the times that I hate my job. If I had just remembered to pass off my freaking phone, I wouldn't have known that five minutes later, the mother crying in the hall would be told that we couldn't do anything to save her son.
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