Author: Erin Baumgartner

Erin Baumgartner (3 Posts)

Contributing Writer Emeritus

University of Louisville School of Medicine

Erin is a Class of 2016 medical student. She has a B.A. in English. She took a year off before medical school to work as a Emergency Medicine scribe, and to learn how to make cupcakes from scratch. She enjoys discovering the story-telling inherent in every patient encounter.




Pansies, Rosemary and Rue

Published by Erin Baumgartner

Truthfully, I pick her name off the new patient list because it belongs to a woman, and several of our male patients have already come upstairs flagged for aggression. It is too early in the morning, and late in the week, and I haven’t yet learned that female patients can be just as unpredictable as the men. I am in a hurry this morning, and I make the mistake of not skimming through her chart before I go in to see her. I don’t know any more than the barebones: her name and her chief complaint upon admission.

Code Blue: See One, Do One

Published by Erin Baumgartner

I had experienced codes before. Prior to entering medical school, I had worked as an emergency room scribe, charting patient encounters as they unfolded. I considered myself familiar with a code’s whirlwind of action, always one step away from the true pandemonium. After all, I had stood on its borders, plucking shouted orders and silent actions from the maelstrom, weaving them into a coherent, documented clinical picture. Naïve, and all too eager to count at …

Erin Baumgartner (3 Posts)

Contributing Writer Emeritus

University of Louisville School of Medicine

Erin is a Class of 2016 medical student. She has a B.A. in English. She took a year off before medical school to work as a Emergency Medicine scribe, and to learn how to make cupcakes from scratch. She enjoys discovering the story-telling inherent in every patient encounter.