by Patricia Bunch

Created on: January 05, 2009

I am a retired nurse. One of my daughters is a paramedic working with the local EMS, another is a critical care nurse practitioner and the director of nurses in the unit where she works. She flies with a air ambulance three twenty-four hours shifts a month. When making schedules to cover the holidays, it is important to always have plenty of staff scheduled or on-call to cover the day after Christmas since this tends to be one of the health care worker's busiest days.

One would wonder why is this so? Are not all other workers, beside health-care workers, still off from their nine to five jobs taking it easy and all laid back? True, some may be, while some are speeding down the highway on their way back home, sometimes on slick surfaces and the next thing they know, if they live to tell it, they are either over a cliff, fallen asleep at the wheel, and off the road, or so many other scenarios which cause automobile accidents, some with injuries, some worst.

Picture in your mind the mother who goes into the living room where her child has been left for only a moment to play with his new toys. His face is blue and he isn't breathing. Somehow he has managed to remove the tire from his new fire truck and has put it into his mouth where everything goes and it is now lodged in his windpipe (trachea). He's choking to death. She dials 911, and frantically begins to try to get him to breath while she waits for what feels like an eternity for the paramedics to come.

Then there are the countless others who have eaten left-overs. Egg salad left out for more than two hours. Turkey sandwiches out of turkey left on the counter over night. "What will it hurt, it's probably alright". That was what the teenagers were told when their mother's told them the turkey was to be thrown away, it had been sitting out all night. Now the teenager is vomiting and having the diarrhea all at the same time and Mom is dialing 911. The ambulance will soon be there to get an intravenous line started and take this dehydrated teenager to the hospital to join all the others who had eaten tainted foods left from Christmas dinner.

Eating large meals can sometimes cause an exacerbation of existing illnesses such as heart disease. A full stomach and an enlarged heart doesn't mix. Heart patients often present to the emergency departments the day after Christmas. Diabetic patients, patients in chronic kidney failure; the temptation of forbidden foods sometimes get the best of them and they give over and eat

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