Everyone Knows More than I

It’s been a busy few days. I was at work one day last week, and we were simply overloaded with patients. In our 100 bed ED, we at one point had more than 220 patients. The waiting room saw every seat full, and some people were standing. Wait times were more than 6 hours for some people to even get a room inside of the department. I wound up working for 15 hours, and even then they asked if I could stay the rest of the night. When I pointed out that I still had to work the next morning, they asked if I could come in 4 hours early. I told them that I needed to get SOME sleep, so then they asked if I could come in 2 hours early. I agreed.

When I went in the next day, having only had time for 5 hours’ sleep, a shower, and a change of clothes, the backlog had been taken care of. My first patient of the day was a septic man who had a sore on his abdomen, and didn’t realize that he had a blood sugar of over 500. His A1C was 12.7, and he didn’t even know that he was diabetic.

My second patient was a 60 year old woman that had begun speaking gibberish the night before. The family let he go to bed. When she woke up the next morning and was still doing it, they decided that bringing her in was a good idea. We did all of the stroke assessments initially couldn’t find anything. Still, because of the delay, she was not a candidate for clot busters, so we did an angiogram of her head.

While we were waiting for the results, a new family member came in and began yelling at me, wanting to know why we weren’t doing a bunch of ridiculous stuff that she thought needed to be done. I guess her extensive Google search had recommended a bunch of things that she wanted us to do. I explained to her all of the things that we were doing, but she kept on making requests and went so far as to begin flagging down every hospital employee she saw to make these demands. She started getting really loud and mouthy. I finally had to tell her to wait in the patient’s room or I would have to call security. She came unglued at that point and said she wanted to speak to my supervisor so she could have me fired.

I know you would never guess that she was an Amish Canadian from Norway.

The patient eventually was transferred to another facility for brain surgery to fix the extensive blood clot that was found, but since the delay of over 12 hours meant that there was a lot of dead brain tissue there, her inability to walk or speak is likely permanent, and that’s on the family.

That mess was followed by a parade of people with sepsis, some diabetics, and a host of other issues. One diabetic had an A1C that was over 14, meaning that it was off the chart. He claimed to me that he always follows his diet and always takes his medication. Of course, he is lying. He doesn’t need to lie to me, it’s his feet, eyes, and life that he is playing with, not mine.

Every patient that I had wanted to argue and tell me that I didn’t know what I was talking about. Keep relying on doctor google and see what happens. As for me, all it does is keep me employed.