#beckily

grossest memory: Being up to my elbows in someone else’s stomach cavity, trying to hold all the squishy bits in while he was being sewn up. He was conscious, too.

Okay, so ... I’m nineteen years old, working in A&E (ER) as a healthcare assistant (basically a nursing auxiliary, with a few extra skills to be more useful). Guy brought in by the paramedics, in a wheelchair, with a plastic carrier bag on his lap - he’s a bit pale, not in a huge amount of pain, very talkative and bright-eyed. What’s in the bag? Pretty much the contents of his abdomen. Still all attached, just not inside him the way they’re supposed to be. My first introduction to the fact that your internal organs really aren’t laid out neatly at all - they just slosh around in that big ol’ muscle bag. There’s a reason it’s called a cavity, after all.

Anywho, he gets trundled into resus (acute critical care area, usually reserved for major injury following serious accident), and we get a good look while he explains what happened. Apparently an old “friend” of his popped up while he was out and about, and sliced him across the middle with a bread knife. Straight through everything, but miraculously didn’t actually puncture or damage any of the organs beneath. Unfortunately, though, everything just kind of fell out at that point. And it really was just like that - his abdomen was slit open pretty neatly, and his large and small intestines were on his lap. I don’t remember getting a good look at any other organs, although I did get a handful of his liver at one point while we were stuffing it all back in there.

And yup, we had to physically hold it all in while he was stitched up. ~chuckles~ They had us (the two HCAs) fully surgically gowned up, but we were fighting a losing battle trying to hold it all in until the surgical consultant took over the stitching. And to make matters worse, the guy had been given morphine, so he was bright and chatty, and kept trying to get the phone numbers off every nurse and doctor he saw. It was ... incredible.