Gerald O'Malley, DO

A group of my old Navy buddies are making plans to get together at the American College of Emergency Physicians annual Scientific Seminar in the fall. A bunch of salty old Navy ER docs at a convention in Las Vegas - I can see the headlines now.

A few months ago I caught some grief when I described the actions of the Pennsylvania legislature as “theft” and called the governor a crook. The (admittedly) inflammatory statements were made in a blog criticizing the impotence of the Pennsylvania Medical Society when the Pennsylvania state government elected to steal money from the MCARE fund and use it to pay union pensions and fill potholes. I owe the PMS an apology.

My father-in-law passed away on Saturday. Sadao Nagakuni was born in 1942 in Katsurahama, Kochi Prefecture on Shikoku, the smallest and least populated island in Japan. He lived through the occupation of Japan following World War II but he was too young to remember much of it. He loved to swim in the ocean when he was a child, even though it was prohibited because of the rough surf.

I watched about half the film but I couldn’t finish it. There is only so much brutality and cruelty and psychopathology that I can take outside of the ER. As I got deeper and deeper into the movie, I recoiled from the hyper-real depiction of violence and depravity.

Like most ER docs, my diet is atrocious. Shiftwork, the scheduling demands of raising two elementary school-age kids with a working wife and the unpredictable nature of the job conspire to interfere with a normal three-well-balanced-meals-a-day nutritional game plan.

Tonight I tried everything in my power to resuscitate a 43-year-old woman that I pulled out of the front seat of her boyfriend’s car.

The congressional approval of the healthcare takeover bill is so profoundly unjust I can’t not write about it. So much has been written and said about the legislation that the House approved late Sunday night – what more is there to say?

A quick phone call to Poison Control clarified the situation. One patient. No epidemic. No need to call in the health department or to shut down the farmer’s market where our patient bought her mushrooms. At least not yet - but the chase was on.

This post is dedicated to the men and women of the U.S. Naval Medical Corps serving aboard the U.S.N.S. Comfort.

Today, I worked a 7-3 shift in the ER while our political leaders were meeting to talk about what to do with healthcare. Ironic, considering there are roughly two dozen physicians in Congress and not one was seated at the table.

ER doctors (and nurses) rely on pattern recognition to practice the type of medicine that is forced upon us when we take control of 75 patients all crammed into a space designed to hold 48 (with another 30 in the waiting room).

Last year I survived my first trial. It was awful. I walked into the whole ordeal like a lamb to the slaughter. I actually thought that my deposition was going to be a pleasant few hours with the doctor and lawyers talking like professionals about the case and then maybe sitting down to a nice lunch together afterwards. I’m actually embarrassed about my naiveté.

Today my senior resident, I’ll call him Ricky, wanted to order an ultrasound to rule out testicular torsion. Ricky is a pretty sharp guy and he prefaced his request by saying, “I really don’t think he has a torsion, I think he probably has epididymitis, but I want to make sure he doesn’t have a torsion.”

Tonight I worked a shift with an exceptional medical student from a fine school who had never heard of Ignaz Semmelweiz.

I’m not getting immunized against the flu. I’m not immunizing my kids either. Sue me. I’m not a Luddite – I know the science, and I know the statistics, and I know the professional recommendations. My kids have been fully immunized against measles, mumps, rubella, diptheria, varicella, tetanus, and all the other typical childhood diseases. I can explain some of the technical aspects of vaccine preparation. I’m still not snorting the vapor or taking the shot.