Matt and Isaak Experience Livingstone Hospital

Matt Dummer

Because of Matt’s initiative, Matt Dummer and Isaak Jones twice shadowed four interns in the trauma unit of Livingstone Hospital.  The interns they shadowed were only 25-26 years of age.  Matt and Isaak were struck with the fact that they were not much older than they, yet were handling everyone who came in the door.  

Livingstone is a public hospital here, and Matt and Isaak were there on a Saturday night.  I doubt you can imagine what they saw and experienced.  (I know I can't.)  There was a teenager with welts all over his body, which resulted from a whipping with a PCV pipe.  His muscles were so wounded, he was urinating protein.  They saw someone with a bullet in his head, and a woman who had been stabbed multiple times.  Another man was having an AKA - which Isaak had to explain was an "above the knee amputation."  A child, approximately 10 years old, soaked in blood, sat for several hours by himself before being seen.  


At night's end, the interns apologized to Matt and Isaak, saying it was an extraordinarily  “slow night!”  

Isaak and Matt described what they had seen and experienced during Jim’s intercultural class.  When asked how they would summarize their own learning from the experience, they each said in their own way, “I feel as if I have now seen the worst of the worst.  I found I could handle it.  I can see myself there.  It was affirming – in a backwards kind of way – that the medical field is the right field for me.”