Holiday weekends are always outliers in the emergency department, and coupled with the cooler temperatures and rain that we had, Thanksgiving was even more so. We weren’t busy, with our census hovering at around 60%. We didn’t get a lot of patients, but the ones we got were sick. In other words, we were a true emergency department and not just a free clinic for welfare queens, homeless bums, drug addicts, and illegal immigrants.
My shift was cancelled on Thanksgiving day because there were only 40 patients in a unit with the capacity of over 100. My wife and I had not made dinner plans because I was supposed to be working. We discussed having a freezer pizza, then decided to go out. All of the restaurants in the area were either closed or full, so we wound up driving to Orlando and eating at Maggiano’s. It was amazing.
I actually worked on Friday. A man came in complaining of flank pain. He had a history of kidney stones, so that’s what I worked him up for. It turns out that it wasn’t stones- when his CT scan came back, he was riddled with cancer.
Another man came in came in complaining of shortness of breath that we diagnosed with lung cancer.
At one point, we had a brief rush of patients during the 90 minutes that we were briefly understaffed. The morning nurses had gone home, and the ones scheduled for the afternoon hadn’t come in yet. I was covering 5 rooms for that period, and I was OK with that because three of them were empty. Then a line of ambulances came in to give me an asthmatic, a hip fracture, and a woman with a blood sugar of over 500. While that was going on, a woman flagged me down to unhook her father from telemetry so he could use the bathroom. He wasn’t my patient and I was quite busy, but it only takes a minute. I unhooked him and started to leave, and she stopped me to say, “He doesn’t walk well. I need you to walk him over there.”
I replied that I was too busy to do so and left to go see my patients, so she began yelling at me while following me across the department. I told her that she could walk him to the bathroom if she wanted to. It was at that point that she began yelling even louder and started telling me that I am a dick. She then said, “I am going to go get the doctor and tell him what an ass you are. I hope you get fired.”
My response was to call security. I told security to remove her to the lobby until she learns to control herself and act like an adult. Her husband chimed in at this point, saying “That’s my wife. She’s just worried about her father.” Security asked me if I wanted the husband removed as well, and I replied with: “No, he isn’t interfering with my patient care, just her.”
She ran over to one of the ED doctors and began complaining. The joke is on her. Doctors don’t run the hospital, nurses do. People think that because doctors write prescriptions and orders for patient care, that doctors are in charge, but that isn’t how hospitals work.
Anyhow, my charge nurse had to get involved at this point. He pulled me into the medication room and asked me what happened, then agreed with me that her following me around the ED was interfering with my care of my patients. They decided to teach me a lesson by having the father sign out of the hospital against medical advice. All because I was too busy taking care of sick people to be her personal butler. I guess she showed me.
On top of that, I had a patient with COVID, two with RSV, and the funniest one of all. A woman had gotten in a physical altercation with her roommate, and it was so funny I had to leave the room to keep from laughing. It went like this:
- Doctor: “So why are you here today?”
- Patient: “I got in a fight.”
- Dr: “How did that happen?”
- Pt: “My roommate locked me out of my room and said I wasn’t allowed back in because my pussy is too hairy, so I punched her in the face. She hit me in the face with the remote control, said ‘Merry fucking Christmas,’ then hit me in the face with a fruit basket. I fell and bit her on the toes, and that is how two of my teeth came out.”
It was at that point that I had to leave the room to keep from laughing.
That was my holiday weekend. Now to resume normal blogging…
