There has been a distinct lack of posting here for the past few days. Counting the commute, I’ve been doing 15 hour days lately. So enjoy some stories from the ED.
Back when I was a street medic, I had a 911 call that involved a woman who was concerned that her 4 year old daughter had been eating ants. I reassured her that people all over the world eat insects, and doing so would not harm the child, unless she was somehow allergic to them. I then spend the next little bit explaining what an allergic reaction looked like.
The mother then looked at me, with this relieved look on her face, and said: “Oh good. I was so worried that I gave her a teaspoon of ant poison.”
Say what? “Uh, we have to take your daughter to the hospital, right away.”
“I thought you said ants wouldn’t hurt her,” she says.
“Yes, but you gave your daughter POISON,” I said. She looked at me, rolled her eyes, and replied, “Duh. Didn’t you hear me? It’s ANT poison.”
So as I said, it’s been a busy few days. For every COVID patient, we are getting 3 or 4 flu patients. This flu season is pretty nasty. Just today I had fifteen patients:
- 1 COVID patient
- 2 Stroke Alerts
- 2 Community Acquired Pneumonia
- 4 Septic Influenza Patients
- 1 chemotaxic eye
- 1 Seizure patient
- 1 Choleocystitis
- and…
There was a guy who had 4 toes that looked necrotic. He was a diabetic with a fasting blood sugar of 325. His A1C was 11. I asked him what he had for breakfast, and his reply was “biscuits and gravy.” Then he asked me when he was getting lunch. It was only 9:30 in the morning.
Then there was the guy who came in complaining of abdominal pain in the right upper quadrant that woke him from a sound sleep. For those of you who don’t know, that’s where your liver is located. The whites of his eyes were turning yellow, and he admitted to me that he drank 4 to 5 beers every day. At 10:30 in the morning, and he told me that he had already had two beers that morning.
A 30 year old black woman who makes $18,000 a year, but has 3 kids. She came in complaining of a headache. She is so broke that she had to apply for financial assistance in order to cover her bill. While I was in the room giving her the medicine, I had to listen to the video that was playing on her phone. It was a guy saying that “You are being taken advantage of by the white man. They are trying to keep you down and you are being used as slaves, and you know why.”
They BELIEVE this. They hate you. Remember that.
