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Kitsa · #1

(I'm on bedrest and bored out of my mind, and now you must all suffer.)

I worked in an ER for 8 years. Many of the shifts were evenings and weekends, when the drunkies and weirdos would come in, and it was messed-up. Here are some of the many things that went on, and I'll tack on more when I think of them:

- We had to call in security to forcibly separate a couple trying to have sex in an exam room. It was a Saturday night, and the guy came in stinking drunk with a sprained ankle. Apparently he was hosting a barbecue, they were playing frisbee, and he fell off the air conditioner trying to retrieve the frisbee from the roof. His girlfriend was also stinking drunk, more than a little skanky, and draped all over him. When he was in a wheelchair in triage, she was straddling his lap, making out with him. The nurse got pissed and threw her out of the room. The lady let herself back in and they continued making out. She was escorted by security to the waiting room and told to stay put. She prowled out there for a while, and then managed to sneak back directly behind someone who was let in through the automatic doors. About 5 minutes later we heard the nurse scream, "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!?!?" Turns out they were having it off right there on the gurney. The woman literally had to be pried off the guy by two burly off-duty cops and hauled outside.

- We once intercepted a woman bringing a sack of Big Macs and fries to a patient who had just been brought in by ambulance for a massive MI (heart attack).

- Our hospital was across from the county fairgrounds, and during fair season we were inundated with carnies who used us as a free clinic. Their MO was to come in with a fake name and address as a self-pay...no tracking them later. One guy came in, leaned over the desk and fiddled with our desk stuff, and said "I gots VD." We sprayed everything with Lysol after he left.

- I once worked a midnight shift where a guy was brought in after a bar fight. Some other guy had beaned him with a golf wedge and they found him wandering in the woods behind the bar, crap in his pants and no idea who he was. The bartender broke into his car and found a paper with his wife's number on it, and that's the only way anyone had any idea who he was.

- Here's another one that happened during fair season...a woman was walking along, minding her own business, when for some reason some idiot in an Elephant Ear booth threw some hot oil out the back window. It literally deep-fried this poor woman's arm. She came screaming into the ER, right past the registration desk, crazy with pain, and started grabbing bottles of water out of people's hands to pour over it (not too sanitary, but her arm literally looked like deep-fried turkey). She was flown out to a burn unit.

-We had a bunch of looney frequent flyers. One we called the "skittles lady" because she (and her forty-some kids, or so it seemed) never came in without a jumbo bag of Skittles. When she got mad, she'd throw skittles at them or at us. The kids would get in the skittles and spread them all over. Every time they left we had to call housekeeping to pry squashed skittles out of the waiting-room carpet.

-We had another guy who called the ambulance so often, for such nonsense things (weird-colored snot, headache, funny-smelling gas) that the ambulance got permission from the city to ignore all calls to his house. That didn't stop him, though. He walked to McDonald's, picked up the payphone, dialed 911 and said there was someone unconscious in the parking lot. Then he went and laid down in a parking space. The EMTs were super-pissed when they saw who it was, but they had to bring him in, because it wasn't his house they'd been called to.

- One summer, this poor old man came in literally smelling like death. He had stumbled about 5 miles along a back road , in 90 degree heat, to get to our ER. The smell was, without question, the worst thing I had ever smelled in my entire life, and I took a class at a body farm. As he got to the front desk, he stumbled, and someone rushed out to hold him up. As they did, a centipede crawled out from under his shirt. He had sores all over his body, and they were all infested with insects of just about every description. Turned out he lived in one of those "houses of squalor", his kids didn't take care of him, and I'm pretty sure they got arrested. (The bad thing about working in the ER is that you don't always know how things turn out).

-We had a teenage girl come in by ambulance for abdominal pain, and she delivered a baby in the ambulance bay. She claimed to be completely unaware she was pregnant. She also hadn't told her mom or her boyfriend, who showed up panic-stricken a few minutes later. The physician handling her went out to tell the family, and the mom freaked the hell out. She attacked the boyfriend in the middle of the waiting room.

- I once had a lady clock me on the side of the head with a phone. She was angry about something stupid, I can't remember what...something like the nurse wasn't letting her back during a procedure or something. She grabbed the phone and swung it by its cord, right into my temple. I had a welt there for a long time.

-One time there was this bratty 13 year old girl who was screwing around with the wheelchairs. She was going up and down the hallway, ramming into things and sneering at the triage nurse who kept telling her to stop. The nurse would say, "cut it out, you're bothering people" and the girl would go "myeeehh, you're bothering people, you're bothering people" and keep on ramming into people's shins and stuff. She was heading down the hallway again when suddenly a broomstick handle shot out from one of the exam room doors, about a foot off the ground, right through the wheels of the chair. The chair stopped cold and the girl about flew out. The nurse's head appeared out of the door and she hissed, "I said, stop it." It was the single most awesome snotty-preteen smackdown I have ever seen.

Dr. Octogonopus · #2

That's awesome! Do you have any more stories?
I remember my dad was in the hospital this new year's, and I delivered his dialysis supplies up to his room with a wheelchair to carry them, and I decided to push myself along sitting in the wheelchair to take it back, and this nurse asks me if I was putting it up, so I say yeah, and he just grabs to handles and HAULS. He's running full speed, almost tipping me out at corners, and just shoves the chair and me at the docking station, where I stopped with my legs. He was the single coolest nurse I've ever met.

Colonel Flagg · #3

Kitsa, you could (and probably should) write screenplays for Discovery Health "Real Stories of the ER". Some of these gems are far better than the stuff they usually show.

MarioRPG · #4

My god, some of those stories are genuinely horrifying. My mental image of the man with bug-sores... *shudder*

EDIT: But seriously, those story were actually awesome! I hope there are more!

darkvare · #5

i have a questio since you know about hospitals
some years ago i had a car accident, my injuries weren't too serious but for a 5 or 6 inches cut in the side of my knee.
the question is when they were stitching my leg i wanted to watch i love blood but for some reason the nurse wouldn't let me, why is that?

WhiteRat · #6

Quote:

Originally Posted by darkvare

i have a questio since you know about hospitals
some years ago i had a car accident, my injuries weren't too serious but for a 5 or 6 inches cut in the side of my knee.
the question is when they were stitching my leg i wanted to watch i love blood but for some reason the nurse wouldn't let me, why is that?

Because she knew that if you caught even the slightest glimpse of the stitching that you would transform into a ravenous beast hellbent on raping her.

Dr. Octogonopus · #7

Probably for shock. Blood is blood, but you'd be looking at your torn open leg.

Pub Lover · #8

Because she's fed up with cleaning vomit out of wounds before she dresses them.

You maybe a badass, but she's dealt with too many wannabes to trust again.

darkvare · #9

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dr. Octogonopus

Probably for shock. Blood is blood, but you'd be looking at your torn open leg.

well it may be that but i had already saw it, it was like 3 months after getting the bolts out from my previous shoulder surgery and i even kept thosse

Sethomas · #10

Well, no, from what I understand, if "shock" were an issue from seeing the wound then it would have made itself known long before he'd arrived. Shock was probably more of a boon in that case because the pain wouldn't be nearly as bad as you would expect it to be.

Probably just the nurse had personal experience with people who would react to seeing the stitches as if they were feeling it, when in fact they couldn't. Such people might make her work harder by flinching even though the pain isn't more of an issue than if they couldn't see it, blah blah blah.

Anyways.

My sister wanted to be an ER doctor despite a huge number of people telling her how horrible it is, based on experience and the statistical facts that most ER doctors end up in private practice after a few years burns them out. She did do some sub-intern residency in the ER, but when she got her MD she ended up in IM because she didn't get the ER spot she wanted.

She'll mention random stories from it offhand, but one of her stories is so perfectly depressing that I find myself repeating it here on I-Mockery rather often.

Old lady walks in. Family members come in tow. Old lady complains of stomach ache. My sister feels her abdominal region. Family begins discussing if DNR (do not resuscitate) forms should be signed or not. My sister feels slight shift in lower chest region. Sister realizes very major circulatory pathway has ruptured (I forget which one, sorry!). Sister frantically calls for attending. Family picks up on the urgency of the situation. Old lady listens for a short while as her family members scream at each other over how much effort should be put into saving her life. Old lady dies, family doesn't notice.

My dad has a few good stories from working ER, but most of them are things I had to hear from other people who heard them from him because that's how my family is when it comes to x-ray images of things found in the colon that elude easy comprehension of how or why they were put there*. I remember one time I came home from a Saturday morning funeral my freshman year for a classmate, and my dad was in the kitchen in blood-spattered scrubs. He explained that it was from a gang member (yes, there are a few of those in Indianapolis) who got shot up, and once he was sewn back together he was told to leave within a few hours (!!!) but he didn't want to because the people who shot him were waiting in the parking lot. It turns out, this was actually true, and there was probably an issue when the hospital did in fact discharge a man who had very recently been shot because they ran out of beds. This is a pretty common thing in the summer from what I'm told as violent acts go up along with the thermometer, but the oddest part of the story was that it was about 10° F that night.

I did in fact hear this story from the person who was directly involved, but I managed to forget about it a long time and had to be reminded from a friend who also was there to hear the story. Thus, while I'm reasonably confident that this did happen, I can't give you any background as to how much humor was intentional versus how much of it reveals a side of humanity that we don't want to look at.

Man experiments with anal stimulation.
Man inserts vibrator into rectum.
Complications prevent man from removing vibrator from colon.
Man goes to emergency room.
Doctors roll eyes.
Doctors explain procedure by which they will remove the vibrator.
Man asks in response, "actually, could you just replace the battery?"
The mind boggles.

*He doesn't hesitate to allude to these stories with the phrase, told to others who know what he's talking about while he assumes that I do not, "I fell on it", that references an excuse that he had evidently heard a disturbing number of times.

Fat_Hippo · #11

Cool stories guys, you really should send some of these to the wirters of some hospital sit-com or other. Particularly the skittles lady.

Sethomas · #12

Actually, "Skittles Lady" was a working gag among the writers of Seinfeld, but through a convoluted chain of script revisions her character ended up as "the soup nazi" by the time they had a working draft.

Pentegarn · #13

I used to work with a guy that we glossed "The Professor" because he was in charge of teaching new employees how to do their job. His wife was involved with data entry for ER cases. He had all kinds of stories about the things people came into the ER for. One of the worst ones though involved a person trying to do the "put a gerbil where gerbils ought not go" thing, only he didn't have a gerbil available, so he used a mouse. Mice as most people know, are adept burrowers. Apparently, he succeeded in getting this mouse into the place he was trying to get in, but it felt compelled to burrow its way out. That story made me wince visibly when he told it.

Kitsa · #14

Oh, I have lots and lots of stories

I used to write for a website and pretty much put stories up as they happened, and it kills me that the place is down now (and very little of it accessible through archive.org), because I know there's a ton that I'm forgetting.

-One night, the KKK actually came in. Seriously. It was some sort of Klan gang, ten or fifteen huge guys with tattoos of swastikas and lynchings and all sorts of white supremacist symbols. They were bringing in their matriarch, or whatever she was, an old lady showing symptoms of a stroke. Apparently someone in this group had seen a TV show about stroke and had it all set in his mind what was supposed to take place in the first 40 minutes to "cure" the patient, and these guys were hellbent on making sure it happened. Their way of doing this was posting one guy near each place they figured something important was going on. That was back when I was working registration, and this huge guy was just stationed in front of the desk, arms crossed, staring us down. Another one was following the triage nurse, another posted himself at the ACC (unit clerk) desk, and one literally followed the physician right into other patients' rooms, I guess to intimidate him into ignoring everyone else in favor of Momma. We pressed the emergency security buzzer under the desk, but I was a bit disappointed in them...they just sort of stood around, like the Klansmen, and acted like they couldn't do much (our security guards were off-duty cops and were very conservative about putting themselves on the line). It was a standoff for a long time, then the woman was transferred upstairs and I guess they all went up there to intimidate the unit people. It was really, really fucking freaky, though. I still remember the t-shirt of the guy posted by me...it had a lynching on it, with the victim depicted all cartoony-racist with his tongue hanging out. It was pretty horrible.

- We had a lot of people who watched medical shows and thought that made them experts. One lady came tearing in with her kid bobbing limply in her arms (that happened a lot, usually the kid had a low-grade fever) and screeched that he needed "50 units of CC STAT." God, it was all we could do to keep a straight face.

- We had two unrelated patients come in after a car accident, and the family all had to wait in the waiting room through most of the workup. They got really, REALLY comfortable out there. So comfortable, in fact, that they rearranged all of the waiting-room furniture into a big group and ordered pizzas on the waiting room phone. They actually sat out there, ate their pizzas, and had a grand old time, and nurses had to keep coming out and asking them if they'd like to check on their family members now. They were actually waved off...."yeah, yeah, in a minute"!

-I loved when Scrubs came up with "The Ass Box". It's so true, although we'd never have kept a box. People came in with the damnedest stuff up their asses. You could always tell, too...it was usually a middle-aged guy who walked in funny and refused to tell anyone what was wrong with him unless it was a male physician. Most of the time it was a vibrator and they just waited for the battery to run down, but there were also shot glasses, mini-shampoo bottles, balls of every variety but the anatomical one, vegetables, and so on. There was even a lightbulb, and I think it was delivered with ky jelly and a pair of forceps. I vaguely, vaguely remember a guy who had filled his ass with cement and then it set up, but I don't remember if that was in our hospital or something someone repeated as happening to them elsewhere.

- The absolute BEST story ever didn't take place in our ER at all. It was told to a stunned Medical Ethics class by our professor, who was giving a lecture on confidentiality. You ready for it?

The professor was on the Ethics board of an inner-city hospital and this was a case referred to him. A hooker kept presenting to te ER with an infected colostomy opening. They kept treating it and discharging her, and she kept showing up with a raging infection again. Finally, someone thought to ask her why. Her response..."I can charge more for that hole."

We all just sat there, horrified. The teacher said, "How many of you think that's the most disgusting story you ever heard?" Everyone raised their hands. Then he said, "And how many of you will never repeat it?" Nobody raised their hands.

Re: the suturing question...I don't know, but I think it might be because the nurse had previous bad experiences with people wanting to watch work done on themselves, and she didn't want to take a chance on making the job harder than it already was.

Dr. Octogonopus · #15

I mostly said shock because the same thing happened with my friend. He busted open his arm, and when we were at the ER getting him stitched up, he was fine looking at it bloody but when it was cleaned up he saw the meat or something and absolutely flipped out, and they had to treat him for shock. He's a dumbass.

BurntToShreds · #16

All of this makes me want to become a medical worker even more. Houston's even the best place to learn, too. The Texas Medical Center is the largest medical district in the world.

The One and Only... · #17

They say we need to invest in human capital. Old age is a testament to why we need to liquidate it.

No, seriously. At a certain point, I don't understand why people want to burden themselves with the pain of living and shatter their posterity's inheritance with medical bills. I'm not advocating euthanasia - one can choose to forego medical treatment instead of directly committing suicide - but with a clear head I think cutting down the elderly population has solid utilitarian grounds. Perhaps I'll have to wait to get it later in life.

Also, those stories are ridiculous.

Grislygus · #18

No one but Kitsa and Seth should be allowed to post here

unless you're a bona fide cool person

Dr. Octogonopus · #19

Especially the dancing Shin Chan ass.

Kitsa · #20

- When I worked in Registration (the early early years), we had to ask every patient if they had a living will. People who actually knew what that was were a minority; most people thought that the hospital was trying to get all their stuff if they died, and that was a pain. But one woman not only knew what it was, she had her living will right there with her. When asked if she had a living will, she ripped her shirt open (a la Superman). There, situated right between her boobs and festooned with floating Lady of Guadalupe images, was a living will, tattooed on her chest in old English font. It was pretty damned weird, but no one's going to miss that when trying to resuscitate her.

-Two boys, neighbors, had gone to the store with Mom and showed a keen interest in cleaning supplies. The mom, none too bright, went along with their requests to buy "The Works" (some sort of cleaning fluid, I gather) and some other chemicals. Once they returned home, the mom went inside to unpack groceries and the boys made off with the cleaning stuff. They were in the midst of playing "bombs" when a container exploded in one boy's face. He was brought in screaming, blinded, with the dumb mom and the other kid, who was scared shitless. It took a long flush and lots of neutralization to get even a little vision restored. The physician on duty was so angry at the general stupidity that as soon as the kid was stable, he stormed into the waiting room, lifted the other kid by the shoulders, and shook him. I've never seen anyone shake a kid like that, but he was doing it, screaming "Are you STUPID?!? He could have gone BLIND! He might STILL go blind!" and stuff like that. It made quite an impression on everyone.

-One kid was a foreign exchange student celebrating the 4th of July with his host family. He lit a firecracker, then a bee landed on him. He got so panicked about the bee and trying to get away from it that he forgot the firecracker he was holding. He lost all the fingers on that hand.

- There was a gang shooting and the victim was dumped in the grassy median of our parking lot. We knew nothing about it until people started coming in to complain about "that bloody guy" on the lawn. He ended up dying, and one policeman went back to get information as another somehow apprehended the car that dumped him. He brought the two guys in and sat them across from my desk, telling them to wait. They were playing innocent and actually did (why did they not run?), and I was left alone with them as the cop rejoined the other cop. And then they started talking to each other and bragging in Spanish about the shootout, did you see how I popped this one, etc. They didn't know I knew Spanish, and I was trying like hell not to let on. I was scared out of my mind and still am. I know nothing.

chemquat · #21

about the stitches: i had stiches on my arm when i was 8, and they let me look. looking back i think maybe they thought it would calm me down if i knew what they were doing, instead of keeping it some big secret. i handled it well, didn't cry at all once everything got comfortably numb.

i've worked in very small hospitals that have been pretty close to larger facilities, and i think that keeps most of the interesting stuff away from us. if it's a serious condition, they go to the larger hospital b/c they can handle it better. and if it's just a hilarious situation, they go to the larger hospital b/c there's less chance someone will know them.

however, there was an incident here a few years ago--two women had fought, and one was brought here for treatment. the other woman showed up and decided to continue the argument with the patient's family, and she ended up getting thrown out of the window in the lobby.

at my last hospital a patient tried to bribe me with a steak dinner in exchange for taking as long as possible to process his paperwork, to give his body enough time to get his blood alcohol down to a non-DUI limit. i just smiled and nodded and got him away from me as quickly as possible.

MetalMilitia · #22

Just noticed this on Digg:

8 Crazy Stories From the ER

My favourite is:

An elderly woman from a nursing home was brought in and complained of a "large ball” between her legs. It was her uterus, which had come out of her vagina. When one gets older everything starts to sag, and in some cases hang out, including the uterus and rectum.
A rectal prolapse is fairly common in both older men and women, and generally comes from weakened ligaments and years of strained bowel movements. So, eat fiber, drink water, and do your Kegel exercises.
Naturally, the sight of a vaginal or rectal prolapse is very distressing to patients. I find that the general silence around the subject only serves to make it that much more alarming. In reality, it is fairly common in older adults and very treatable.