If you scroll down a wee bit on my page and look to the right, there are links to some other blogs I find myself sucked in to. Crass pollination (Nurse K) has a witty dry style that is strangely addicting. I was reading her blog tonight and it reminded me of a lovely patient we picked up once. (They type of patient who makes you want to slap the palm of your hand to your forehead then take a vacation from this line of work and go flip frozen cow parts or deep fry something for a week or two). Anyway, here she was...
I was working another county at the time and we were called to whatever the specific address was. The building was a medical building physically connected to the hospital. It seriously would have taken then staffers at said doctor's office less time to put the patient in a wheelchair and roll her through the halls than it probably did just to explain to dispatch their suite number, location, nature of the call, age of the patient, etc, etc. Anywho, weee-oooooh, weeee-ooooh, here we come. We drag our stretcher up to said suite number, and find our patient lying on a hospital bed in the hallway outside the doctor's office. They had already done the hard part of maneuvering her through the thirty seven doorways inside the office maze. A disinterested girl dressed in scrubs stood in the hallway with the patient, chart in hand, picking at her nails, awaiting our arrival.
We scratched our heads, rolled our eyes, and pushed the patient through the hallway and the rest of the building to get to the ER. Our patient was conscious, alert, oriented, and complaining of (insert random, non-specific, non-life-threatening complaint here) so the three minute walk went by without a hitch. We got to the ER and gave report to the nurse. We handed the chart over to the nurse. The chart was missing basic info (hey- don't shoot the messenger) so the nurse shot us a dirty look, then sighed and asked the patient the name of their primary care doctor. The patient drew a complete blank (seriously, Bambi in the headlights) and said they didn't know. I tried a different approach and asked the patient which doctor they had gone to see today, the one that sent them to the ER. The patient looked at me as if I had four heads and snapped "Well! Don't YOU know where YOU picked me up?" Without missing a beat I replied "yes ma'am....on a bed in a hallway." She didn't like that, but it was the truth.
The nurse moved on to other questions, and each time our patient expected us to know the answers, or consult Sister Cleo or the magic 8 ball or a fortune cookie or something. That got really old really fast. I could tell her nurse had had enough. The nail in the coffin was when the nurse asked our patient if she knew what medications she was on. The patient thought and replied "Well, no, but if you have a list with all the medicines on them I could pick mine out..." The nurse turned on her heels, vanished, and promptly returned with the latest "Physicians Desk Reference" (PDR). It's a giant list of medications. It landed on the bed with a thud. "Here's your list!!!".
Nurse K, that wasn't you, was it?
1 comments:
HAHAHAHAAA
OMG! Really I can see me being like this someday. Come on people.
Post a Comment