Pages from the Philips Seeking God's leading in medical missions

First Two Weeks of Residency

Christo is just about half way done with his first rotation of his intern year, trauma surgery.  It has been a long couple of weeks for our family as Christo has spent so much time at the hospital because of how busy the trauma service is at Parkland.  It has felt like more than a month has passed by because Christo is routinely putting in 80 hours or more a week while on this service.

The trauma service at Parkland Hospital is busy because the three trauma teams take call every third night (meaning you come in on a morning between 5 and 6 AM and you stay till the next day until about 12-1 PM).  The 30+ hour shifts are extremely tiring because right after you finish call you go home and sleep the rest of the evening but then you have to get up the next day again between 4 and 5 AM to do another 10-12 hour day in the hospital.  Thankfully the last two nights that Christo has been on call has been fairly calm and so he was able to manage several hours of sleep on one night and about an hour last night.

The patients that are seen at the trauma service at Parkland are interesting because they come from up to several hours away when rural hospitals get a trauma victim that they just can’t take care of at their facility.  The helicopters that fly to our hospital will bring in patients from up to two hours away and just last week we had patients come in from Southern Oklahoma and East Texas.  Trauma is also an interesting rotation because you meet people from all walks of life because if you get into an accident or get shot, the best place to be regardless of how much money you might have is to come to Parkland.  Most nights on call we get between 10-20 patients out of which about 30% will be Level 1 traumas and the remaining being Level 2 or 3 traumas.  Some nights we will get as many as four or five gunshot wounds/stab wounds and other nights it might be just car or motorcycle wrecks.  Speaking of motorcycles, if you drive a motorcycle please put on a helmet and put on a protective vest when you ride because it is just astounding to see the amount of road rash and head injury people get as a result of crashing a motorcycle with no protection on.

I’ve also been encouraged by the opportunities I’ve had to encourage my patients and pray with them as many of them are going through a very unexpected life event when they arrive in our ER.  It has been wonderful to see how many patients have appreciated me sitting down with them to pray and to turn over to God their healing process and surgeries they have coming up ahead.  My hope and prayer is that I will be able to continue doing that to meet my patient’s spiritual needs even when I’ll be busier in the emergency room.

We classify traumas into three levels depending on the severity of the injury and how stable the patient is when the emergency medical service teams arrive at the scence.  Level 1 patients are usually the sickest patients (usually your gunshot wounds, stab wounds, and car crash with intrabdominal or intrathoracic injury).  Level 2 and 3 tend to be patients with still severe injuries but they are stable (most of your broken bones etc).  When a Level 1 trama is paged to us, that prompts the most massive response where the full surgical team, radiology, lab, and respiratory all respond.  The goal is to minimize the time the patient has to spend in the emergency room before they need to go to the OR in case they need to have an immediate operation.  In some cases for extremely sick patients we can have them up to the OR in about five minutes time once they arrive in the ER.  Did you know that just the nursing charge for a Level 1 activation is 10,000 dollars, a Level 2 activation is 7,500 and a Level 3 activation is 5,000?  Looking at those numbers it is very easy to see how so many people go into bankruptcy from one unfortunate accident because of how quickly these bills will add up.

It is also interesting to work at Parkland because often times when you go home and read the newspaper you find out that the stories they write about are the patients that you took care of while working at the hospital.  Most recently we had several level 1 burns come into the hospital last night and I Googled about the incident and found the story online.  The main responsibility that I’ve had on the trauma service as an intern is to manage all of our patients on the hospital floors.  When we started the service at the beginning of July we inherited the largest trauma service with over 24 patients to be split up between the two interns.  Thankfully with some diligent work and some relatively calm call nights we have manged to decrease that list down to 11 which has been much more manageable.  I have also been blessed with another great surgical intern, Regan, who has helped tremendously in getting the work done.

Outside of hospital life, Melissa and the kids have hunkered down while I have put in long hours at the hospital.  Melissa has helped me out with some of my patients by offering to make them treats so that they at least have something special while they are in the hospital.   They have had lots of time to hang out together and enjoy time with our new puppy Daisy.  The kiddos have also finally moved into separate bedrooms last week because often times we have had the problem of one kid waking up the other when they woke up from their sleep.  Thankfully that arrangement has worked out fairly smoothly. This past Saturday we also got to take the kiddos along with Appachan and Ammachi to the Dallas Zoo.  Christo’s parents had given Karuna and Luke a season family pass to the zoo because the kids love animals and it was a great success.  The kids loved seeing the many types of animals and they loved the children’s area where they got to play in puddles of water.  We knew it was a success when we got the kids home in the afternoon and within 2 minutes both were sound asleep!  Last Saturday we also went to the Taste of Dallas, an annual event hosted in the West End where restaurants serving all types of cuisine bring their food for people to try.  We enjoyed the middle Eastern, Thai, and Carribean food we got to try at the event.

We also received sad news last week when we found out that Christo’s grandmother, Injumma, had passed away.  She had been ill and dependent on a feeding tube for several years after she suffered a stroke and so in some ways we are glad that she can finally have some rest but difficult in that this was the last of Christo’s grandparents.  Thankfully we were able to see her in April when we were in India along with Christo’s mom and dad and so we felt like we were able to say our goodbyes then.  The funeral took place late last week in India and almost all of Christo’s Dad’s family in India was able to attend the funeral.

Next week will bring about some new travel for our family.  Melissa, the kids and Daisy will be driving back to Nebraska to attend a friends wedding and then to be there for her sister Kris’ graduation.  Melissa’s brother David is planning on flying down a couple of days before so that he can help her drive from here to Nebraska.  Her sister Kris is also planning on driving back with them and then flying back and so hopefully it will be a manageable trip to do on their own.  Christo will transition back to the emergency department starting on July 28th to spend four weeks in the ER before going to toxicology.

We are really behind on posting pictures but at least we will try to go in the right direction by posting some pictures from early June.  The first set of pictures is from a get together we had with Christo’s cousins at the beginning of June which was our first time to have a large group of guests over.  You can view the slideshow by clicking here or just click on the pictures to pull them up individually.  The second set of pictures are just some random pictures we took in June on our trips the farmers market and during some of our home improvement projects.  You can view the slideshow by clicking here or by clicking on the pictures individually.