The other day was like amateur night in the ER. Bogus “hurt my arm 2 weeks ago, need pain
meds” guy from a town 40 miles away, one with a hospital and ER of it’s own,
incidentally. Carried a 44oz Styrofoam
cup full of soda into the triage room with that horribly injured arm but when I
began questioning him about his symptoms, he began to writhe in pain and
whimpering. Piss poor actor.
In a few minutes after getting this rather odiferous
individual out of my triage room, comes yet another pre-triage sheet through
the slot with the same last name on it.
This is something people do. At
least in our area. They all come to the
ER together like a sporting event.
Friends all sitting around the living room watching TV and Jerry
Springer gets over and nothing good on so they load up and head to the ER to
kill some time before Walker, Texas Ranger comes on at 4, or something.
The other triage was hurt arm man’s tweaker mother. The family that smokes rocks together, stays
together. They were both so fucked up
they could barely put any sentences together.
Drug-seeking, I suspected but they weren’t at themselves enough to even
get any appropriate symptoms or stories straight in their heads. Her chief complaint was lice for which she’d
treated herself with olive oil and dog flea shampoo and then, as a last resort,
lice shampoo. Okay. And?
Let me guess. You’re here for
admission to our adult psych unit?
Soon after, we got a 22-year-old girl in who’d fallen off
a horse. Abraised her great toe and
broke her radial head right off. In the
words of Walter Mattheau, fortunately for her, she’d had a few glasses of
whiskey just prior to the accident so it wasn’t as painful as it might have
been. She kept us in stitches with her
nonsense. Her blood alcohol was
165. Funny gal. And not a faker. And too drunk to act.
What’s not to like?
Then
the thorn in my side. A 70-year-old man
who came in for a 2-week history of constipation and weakness. No obvious distress. I had to bite my tongue hard during that triage. The whole time. He really got under my skin and I had to fight hard to not ask
him what the fuck he thought he was doing in there wasting our time. I was busy in triage for the rest of the
shift but I could see him come out to the desk every once in a while wanting to
know how much longer it was going to be.
I couldn’t believe this guy, coming into the ER for something he could have fixed by going to
Walmart and buying some colace. Hadn’t
called his doctor. Couldn’t even
remember his doctor’s name. He was still there when
I left at the end of my shift and I forgot about him except a mental note to
use him in my writing as an example of ER abuse. (Something about his case
really irritated me).
The
next day I was at work and I heard the unit secretary talking about a CT
report. In the ER, the xrays and CTs
are all read by the radiologist in person, if it’s during daytime hours, or
remotely if it’s after hours. The
results get called to the ER doctors as soon as they’re read but the actual
transcription isn’t usually done until the next day and then prints out on our
copier. So I’m hearing the unit
secretary talking about a patient with cancer and on and on until I realize
she’s talking about that guy from the day before, the 70-year-old. She’s got the CT report in her hand so I
took it from her and read it.
Masses
in his liver, bladder, around his aorta and, probably the origin, his
prostate. Clearly terminal. Clearly very soon.
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