It usually happens when a guy walks in through the waiting room with a bullet hole in the belly or someone gets stabbed and is dumped in front of the ambulance bay by their so-called friends who drive them. Other times it happens when we get a 1-minute ETA and the trauma team hasn’t arrived by the time the patient rolls into the bay.
We run our traumas the same way every time. Every patient, every time, same system. But when the team is still getting assembled as the patient is rolling in and not everyone is on the same page, it’s easy for our systematic and typically well run resuscitations to get off track.
When this happens and the whole team is out of sync, someone will call for a reset. A ‘reset’ is common language in the trauma bays. It means that the entire team stops and resets the resuscitation. We have one voice in the room and they give a recap of the situation. Who the patient is, what was the mechanism of injury and what all has been done since the patient’s arrival. Every movement and every sound in the room that is not imperative to the patient’s survival stops the moment a reset is called. Everything stops, everyone listens and everyone resets.
After a reset, resuscitations tend to run smoothly because everyone is back on the same page and everyone is communicating and working cohesively.
Common language is powerful and effective. That’s why in our trauma resuscitations, every one knows what a reset is and everyone knows what to do when a reset is called.
A few months back we seemed to be off kilter. We were trudging ahead in our lives and marriage despite being out a sync. We were working fast and furiously but not cohesively. We were talking and speaking out but not communicating
We needed to reset.
It’s was my wise husband’s idea and because of the the power of the common language we both associated with the word ‘reset,’ when he called it, I knew exactly what he meant.
So we called for a hard life reset.
We stopped and assessed the state of our lives and marriage.
We realized there were things in our life that were equivalent to the extraneous noise and tasks of the trauma bays that we needed to eliminate, just like we would in a trauma reset.
So we eliminate the extraneous.
We canceled travel plans.
We cut back on our commitments.
We said no to anything that was not essential to our lives and marriage.
And slowly but surely we have gotten back in sync.
We've gotten back into our rhythm, being able to move forward with a game plan, working cohesively as a team.
But first, we had to stop and reset.