It's a stifling Monday evening. Casualties, as usual, is humming with activity. It is handover time and I am just walking in to take over (from my exhausted colleague). She walks me to one of the side rooms where a middle-aged gentleman is lying sleepily on the unmade bed.
His face is swollen and I see something that looks like grass covering his whole head, face, and shoulders.
"Yeah... that's bee stingers," she says tiredly. Then I see it for the first time. Each speckle on his face. There must have been at least 300 bee stingers covering his whole face.
Unfortunately being in short-staffed casualties means the tedious task of taking each stinger out will become mine. Sure enough, a few minutes later, I take a chair and a sterile tweezer and start taking each one out. It felt like clipping grass with scissors. The patient, still semi-intoxicated, is commenting on the other patient's story of breastfeeding while drinking- and I contemplate the irony of him judging her for using the same substance that got him in this predicament. "When I first walked in here, I thought I was dead", he confessed to me. And I fully believe him, examining his swollen eyes, enormous lips, and enlarged neck.
After an hour of picking at his face each visible stinger is out- he thanks me wholeheartedly.
I am reminded in that moment- as a doctor (studying 6 years and working in the most horrible conditions for another 3 years) this should have been "below me"- anyone can take a tweezer and take out bee stingers...but compassion and care is something all people long for. Maybe all those years were just foundations for making compassion visible.
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Casualties
Kurgu OlmayanHave you ever wondered what are the weirdest and most brutally honest tales doctors hear and experience in the emergency room? Well, wonder no further. Here is a collection of short stories of unbelievable true stories of what doctors experience dai...
