DEPARTMENT OF EMERGENCY MEDICINE "We Have a Commitment to Life."

"We Have a Commitment to Life."

I felt I must smell like vomit when I left the Emergency Room today. These are the pat ients I drew: an old woman covered with bed sores and fecal matter, a young woman with a tube down her mouth to wash out the sleeping pills. A Sister talked to her about seeing the psychiatrist. Here especially, pretty young girls always get the attent ion. Yelling down the hall was an obese, swollen man, when he talked, and when he was asked to walk, he said that snakes were going to get him; another D.T.

Wait for transportation to ward.

An infant was brought in with a strange burn on one side of his buttocks. The severe burn was caused, the mother explained, by hot water. She said she had left the nine month old baby boy with her boyfriend while she went to class at a night school and he had left the baby in the sink with hot water running while he went to open the front door. Only one side of the buttocks was affected and one realized that the water would have diffused and burned both sides.

The intern called in a social worker from the Pediatrics Pavilion, where research was being done on battered children. By a recent law, assault on a child had to be reported within thirty-six hours. The staff told me that parents often take their battered children to different emergency rooms so that by rotating hospitals they are not as easily identified. The last case in this emergency room was first-degree murder.. .a little girl who had been severely burned by her father and then deserted at the hospital. A few staff members gave skin grafts to her, although they all knew she was g oing to die. One of them looked at my pained face and said, "We have a commitment to life."

Care is needed for the parents, too.


The hospital is staffed with physicians who are mostly under the age of thirty. And, as always, a pretty girl gets extra attention.

Department of Emergency Medicine