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#1. What's the most common reason people might come to the ER?
The top three complaints that come into the emergency department nationwide are headache, chest pain, and abdominal pain.
#2. What do you wish more people knew before they walked into an ER?
The number one thing that I wish people knew more about is that the philosophy in the emergency department is a little different. We are not there to figure out what exactly it is that's causing your problem. We're there to make sure it's nothing life-threatening.
So if you come in with chest pain and we do all of our tests, and we do all of our evaluation, we do our physical exam and ask about your history, et cetera, and all the tests come back negative. We may be able to tell you this isn't a heart attack. This isn't a pulmonary embolus. This isn't a thoracic aortic dissection. But we can't tell you for sure what it is sometimes, and I think that that's really frustrating to a lot of members of the lay public 'cause they wanna know what it is.
#3. What's something people often come to the ER for, but probably don't need to?
I would say the number one answer is asymptomatic hypertension. So, just because your blood pressure is high doesn't mean you need to come to the emergency department. And more importantly, the problem with high blood pressure is, is that it causes problems over an extremely long time. So people who have no symptoms that just come in because they're like, oh, I got my blood pressure checked, and it was 180 over one 40. Those people, usually, we turn right back around and send them home.
#4. On the flip side, what's one symptom that's an immediate red flag that it needs immediate attention?
I would say chest pain. And honestly, the number of people that come in with chest pain that have something that's serious is, is pretty high. More importantly, the problem is, is that your symptoms don't necessarily match what's going on.
#5. What's something people never expect about your job, but probably should?
I don't think people realize the amount of time that we spend charting. People have this vision of running around saving lives. I think that there's also this idea that every day in the emergency department is life or death. And I would say, the number of patients that come in that we have, life or death interventions, is much smaller than what gets shown on TV.
#6. How do you stay calm when your job gets kind of chaotic?
I would say that when things are really bad in the emergency department, in terms of multiple patients that are doing very poorly all at the same time, relying on your nurses is crucial, and having great nurses. Here at the University of Utah, we are so blessed to have such phenomenal nurses and such phenomenal techs to help us out, and knowing who it is that you can trust to manage some things, and so that way you can do some other stuff is really, really important.
#7. What's something that people can do at home or prepare for that might save them a trip to see someone like you in the emergency room?
Well, that's a tough one. I would say, unfortunately, there're gonna be a lot of things that are not like something that you can do immediately, but I would say staying healthy is the number one thing. That means eating right. Getting exercise and odds are that you'll see us less often if you do those sorts of things because you're gonna be in much better shape.
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