Ever wonder who goes to the ER in the middle of "The Storm of the Century"?
1. Plow-guy who cut his hand in a snow blower
2. Man Cold
3. 15 year old not-sick girl with "sores in my mouth for two days since I drank out the glass of somebody at school who I found out had mono". Mom didn't want to wait around for the mono test because "The steak house is closing in an hour and I don't want to have to cook".
4. 16 year old who had "bladder pain" for 10 minutes. Because she was prostrate with pain and walked like the letter "C" between texting her friends and updating her Facebook status, she bought herself an abdominal pain workup. When she asked if the IV would hurt, I said, "well, it's a needle, it's gonna pinch for a second". Mom, on the other side of the bed grasping her daughter's hand and smoothing her hair assured her "it's just a tiny needle, they need to find out what's wrong with you", while the daughter moaned loudly, "I DON'T WANT AN IV! I DON'T WANT AN IV! TAKE ME HOME" whereupon mom told her, "Well, we need to know what's going on in case you need surgery"...WTF?? Who said anything about surgery? which made the kid ramp right up. This 16 year old SHRIEKED when the IV was started and continued to sob about how awful it was for a long time, completely forgetting about her horrible bladder pain. I vaguely remember muttering something about putting on big girl panties and handed mom a couple of People magazines suggesting that perhaps she could read her daughter something to distract her as constantly calling attention to the issue clearly wasn't helping. She was WAY over the top drama and mom was enabling.
"Is she completely unstable?" I asked New Cathy, who merely rolled her eyes. She eventually got Ativan and a completely negative workup. She was our last patient of the night 3 hours before we closed.
The two of us, plus the doc, stayed overnight and worked the day shift. The secretary called in snowbound but we had a contingency lined up for that. We didn't count on Wednesday, that moron, staying over, sleeping in until 9:30 or so, hanging around and not cleaning 2 feet of snow off her car. Did I mention she wasn't even working?
We never saw a soul until 11:30 AM because people wisely stayed off the road, all the ambulance calls went straight downtown as ACTUAL EMERGENCY patients, and the Lady on Elm St. had already already used up her Big White Taxi with the Flashy Lights Ticket the day before.
I was actually bored.
