Medical Morons

To all EMT’s and ER staff in StraightDope land, I’d like to hear your stories on the idiotic things our patients call us for. I’m sure you all have attended someone who is halfway to qualifying for the Darwin Awards.

To start you off, here’s my contribution:

I’m employed as an ALS ambo in a country town in South Australia. Early one morning, I was dispatched with a female colleague to another town approx 50km away, to attend an elderly man with “urinary retention”. Upon arrival, I was met by two women from ther local first aid reponse unit, who were dispatched to “hold the fort” until my ambulance arrived. Neither of the women were sure of the true nature of the complaint because the patient wanted to deal only with another man.

I was ushered in to find the patient in excrutiating abdominal pain. Only when the women left the room did he show me his predicament. Like many older men, he was bothered by having to get up to urinate several times a night, and had tried several methods to effect a remedy. His latest solution was to slip a large wedding ring over his penis to act as a “hose clamp”, an idea which seemed to be effective. Unfortunately, on this occasion he had unknowingly broken a blood vessel distal from the ring, and his penis had swelled overnight into a purple mass about the diameter of a salami. The major source of discomfort was his very distended bladder which he could not drain, which became much worse during the 30 minute return trip to hospital over a bumpy road.

Upon arrival at hospital, the patient’s embarassment increased when the female casualty nurse insisted on exposing the “injury”, in order to make an assessment before phoning the doctor, also a womman. The patient’s only moment of sympathy came when another nurse wodered as to whether the problem could be resolved without losing the swelling…


Knock softly but firmly, 'cause I like soft firm knockers…

I’m just always curious when a patient calls in because they have been having a stomach ache for three weeks. I’m always curious about what has changed today to make this pain an emergency at 4:00 in the morning?


…for more silky smooth segues, write to “silky smooth segues” 610 n 10th street, Albuquerque NM 87109.

First the guy who shagged his wife to death with the Eternal Life ring on his hmm, and now this.

Who are these guys who are small enough to get a ring on it?


Sing glogalimp, sing glugalump,
From deep inside the Wuggly Ump.

ROTFLMAO!!!

I swear to God it was a very large wedding ring - he was an old man and it may have shrunk a little…

Kinoons, I wonder about this often, particularly at that time of the day, when I am trying to focus on how to drive my ambulance while I’m still half asleep.


Knock softly but firmly, 'cause I like soft firm knockers…

I’m not an EMT/paramedic, but I’ll pass one along from last week the hospital. (I didn’t see it myself, but the story made the rounds.)

Girl shows up in the ER with black stuff coming out of her nose. No one could figure out what the hell it was, until finally she admitted that she had been grinding and snorting Lortabs (pretty hard-core pain med).

She turned out to be a fine demonstration of why one should not snort pills–all those fillers in the pills make fine nesting places for microorganisms of all kinds. In her case it was aspergillus, a fungus that usually only infects the immunocompromised, that had set up camp in her sinuses.

After a while, she asks the doctor if this thing she has is contagious. The doctor tells her that it’s not, really, but why do you ask? “Because,” she says, “one of the girls I snort with has the same thing.” The doctors encourage her to get that person in ASAP, and thus see two rare fungal infections in a single day.

I thought about this story all week–not only was this girl grinding and snorting prescription pain pills, but she’s getting together with other people to do it. As my girlfriend put it, “Wouldn’t most people just rent a movie?”

Dr. J


“Seriously, baby, I can prescribe anything I want!” -Dr. Nick Riviera

Lortabs are hardcore? Hell the only opiates weaker are Darvocet and Codeine, if I’m not mistaken. Personally, I’ll take a heaping helping of good 'ol oxycodone (orally) instead. :slight_smile: Snorting half a gram of acetaminophen per pill just to get that 7.5 mg of hydrocodone? Talk about painfully stupid!

Well, no, Lortab isn’t that hard-core as opiates go. You would think they’d find something better to snort, if they’re going to the trouble. It’s probably the best thing they can get out of the doc.

Drug-seekers are always funny. They’ve tried all the pain pills for their back, they say, and the only one that really works is Percoset. Then there are the people who insist that you can’t give them the generic diazepam–they need real Valium, because it works better. (Uh huh. It also makes it easier to sell.)

The problem is that drug seekers make doctors skeptical about patients in pain, so we often under-medicate. I hope I don’t fall into that trap when it’s me.

Dr. J


“Seriously, baby, I can prescribe anything I want!” -Dr. Nick Riviera

I say just give the drug seekers what they want. I’ve seen too many people in serious pain who couldn’t get the drugs they need because of these reasons. Addiction doesn’t develop overnight, especially not to the weaker opiods. It could take weeks of daily use for and kind of dependence to manifest itself. People get too worked up about this kind of thing.

And hell, if someone is determined to get hooked, just let them. Better a bottle of percocet than a syringe of heroin.

My Mom, who’s an RN and worked in ER for 6 years, used to collect these types of stories. She called them GOMER’s (for Get Outta My Emergency Room) Here’s a few of my faves:

Lady comes in suffering from a severe allergic reaction. Her hands and face are swelling up and her breathing is ragged. My mom, the RN on duty, asked her if she’d come into contact with anything she knew she was allergic to. The woman admitted that she had bought then eaten an entire pack of fig Newtons even though she was allergic to them. When asked why she did that, she proclaimed indignantly “They were on sale!”

A woman called the ER explaining that she could see light coming from her son’s anus and should she bring him in. She was told to and when the boy was examined it turned out he had managed to stuff an electronic toy fire truck up his rectum. The light his mother saw was coming from the truck’s headlights.

And last (though there are many, many more)for the revenge minded.
The ER were my mother worked responded to a frantic, but vague, call for help from a young gentleman. The EMT called the ER on their way back to the ER, barely able to stifle his laughter. Apparently the young man had pissed off his wife and then went to bed. She then went home to mother’s but left him a bit of a surprise when he woke up. She had managed to superglue his penis to his thigh and the bottoms of his feet together so that he could not walk. Imagine this guy’s embarrassment when the EMTs arrived!!

Chrisbar


Too new to know better…

St. Chrisbar: Patron Saint of Newbies who have already caught on to the fact that nothing else matters, as long as your post count is high.
Courtesy of SwimmingRiddles

HA! Those are some good ones, chrisbar!

Ok, so I’m not a Dr. but I used to play one in elementary school… Actually, my mom had been an LPN for 20+ years and her personal favorite was a young woman who came in to the hospital who was on vacation. She was suffering from abdominal cramping and had a slight fever. Well, it turns out that this lady (as many of us do) had issues with using “public” toilets and evidentally thought that her hotel room toilet was a little too public as well. She had been holding her… uh, “numba two” in for 11 days! I guess she was gonna wait til she got home…? One enema later, Voila’!! :slight_smile:


If knowledge is power, then just call me PEPCO.

I’d like to add one from the poor patient’s side.
I was sent home from work one day because the itch I had on my pinky toe had developed into one very large swollen pinky toe. I surmised the digit to be infected, but I’m not a doctor.
My own personal physician was on vacation and his office told me to go to the nearest E.R. When I arrived at the E.R. I was told to take a number, just like in a deli. My ticket number was 76. When I sat down, the triage nurse called number 12.
Three hours later, my whole foot up to my ankle is now 3 times it’s normal size. The triage nurse asks me whats wrong.

“I think my foot is infected.” I say.
“Are you sure you didn’t get drunk last night and bang your toe?” He answers.
HUH? I think, but say “It’s hot to the touch, it very tender, it’s red and swollen. I think it’s infected.”
“How much Old E did you have last night?” the big doofus nurse asks me.
The nurse triaged me into the phantom pain department of the E.R. where I sat for another 6 hours while my whole entire leg, up to my thigh, swelled. I complained to the E.R. nurses, they would look at my chart then tell me I’d be seen in the order of the importance of my illness.

The final diagnosis? Cellulitis. Talk about medical morons!

A friend of the family was an EMT and later a fireman. He has some great stories.

He once responded to an emergeny call involving a worker at a bowling alley who liked to peek into the ladies restroom. The guy would climb through the ceiling (via a utility closet) and lay on the rafters, peering down into the stalls from (I think) a vent.

Well, one evening he misjudges his footing and ends up tumbling through the ceiling, impaling himself rather miserably through the thigh on a stall support (all of this in front of some poor woman in a rather “vulnerable” position).

Another time he responds to a fire call. When they get to the scene the only thing smouldering is a group of three teenaged boys.

Turns out they were sniffing butane(?) to get high, spraying it from a pressurized can into a plastic bag from wich they’d suck the gas out of. All of this took place in a small room with little ventilation. I don’t remember if somebody a cigarette set it off or not, but I do remember that the explosion blew two windows right out.

This isn’t ER related, but it’s just too good a story not to share. I’m a medical secretary at a large clinic. A few months ago, I worked in the Department of Dermatology, and one of the physicians told us about a former patient of his, and the story is just soooo sick and wrong. Anyway, so this physician walks into his office one day to see his next patient. There, sitting on the table, is this old lady. This lady had a tumor growing out of the back of her head. This was no ordinary tumor, though. This tumor came forward over her head and HUNG in front of her face, obscuring her vision. Turns out, this tumor had been growing FOR 25 YEARS. The woman finally decided to seek medical attention when IT STARTED GETTING IN HER WAY WHEN SHE TRIED TO EAT. But yeah, there was dried skin falling off it, and I guess it was just disgusting. It just blows my mind…I mean, if I had something growing out of my head, the moment I could tell that something was amiss, I’d get to the doctor and have it checked out.

I got this one from one of the nurses where I did my clinical training…There was a family of inbreds that was pretty well known to the hospital staff – they came in every few months with one or another horrible infection from living in filth, stuff like that. One day they pull up to the ER saying that Mama Inbred is in the back seat, and darn it, she just ain’t been eating. The family has just been letting her sit in the back of the car for most of the week, she doesn’t seem to want to get out, they just throw a hamburger back there every now and then. When a couple of staff members go out to the car to bring Mama inside, it turns out she dead, and has been that way long enough for rigor mortis to set in!

And that, folks, is what it’s like to practice medicine in Alabama.


“There are more things you don’t know than there are things that I do know. I despair of the imbalance.” – Dr. Morgenes, The Dragonbone Chair