hospital tales
I look after a lot of alcoholics at work. One of the things that happens to chronic alcoholics is that their blood clotting goes all to pot and they're very prone to internal bleeds. One young lady had come in losing blood from both ends and was extremely poorly. She was vomiting what looked like pints of fresh blood and had managed to get it all over her face and down her front so she looked pretty gory already. Because of the amount of blood she was losing she had to have an emergency transfusion and we had two bags of blood going into two separate cannulae in her arms. To get it in as fast as we could we were squeezing the bags (can you see where this is headed?). The young doctor on the other side of the patient got a bit keen with the squeezing and the bag burst all over him and the patient. Luckily it was probably less than half full by then but it looks like an awful lot more when it's splattered all over the place.

She died by the way. Don't drink, kids.
(Mary Mandolin still had it on, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 20:54, Reply)