Meat Grinder

Meat grinder.  Those two words together make my stomach twist into a knot.  The appliance is incredibly effective at what it does and it doesn't discriminate between living human beings and meal items for the kitchen.

Over the past several days I closed wounds made by meat grinders and knives, in particular.  First-hand, I've noted that thumbs, especially, are so highly vascularized, that you get a little bit of extra blood whenever you drive the suture needle in.

I repaired the lacerations of someone's hand during the wee hours of the night, and so much was done by feel and tactile feedback.  It's like you "see" where the needle is with your hands when it dives and hides inside tissue for a second.

The same night I closed a wound for someone who was stabbed in the back, literally.  The wound was elliptical, sort of like the eyes in ancient Egyptian art.  Through this wound, I was looking into the body at the deep back muscles, otherworldly.

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"Meat grinder" is also a word used in military circles for a highly deadly combat region.  I've borrowed the term myself as an adjective for the city when a lot of trauma and injuries come in.

At one point late during the night, someone came in with an incredibly low Glasgow Coma Scale score, and I was a little late coming in since I was busy and the case was for another team.  It's an otherwordly experience gazing upon a patient on a table who has just arrived and isn't moving or breathing, and you're standing in a room with barely anyone else.

The patient died of gunshot injuries, whether they were dead on arrival, I can't be certain because I missed the arrival, but it seems like it must have been so, since so few people were still there when I entered the room.

When you work such long hours, you feel like you're lucidly dreaming, existing in some kind of strange dream world because the passage of time is so slow, and the things happening around you are so strange.

I tell people the emergency department is like a night at the cinema: with moments of the bizarre, of human suffering, the unimaginable, the mundane.  In the inner city, it certainly is a strange place, and no night is the same.