Kitsa teacup of sunshine Join Date: Mar 2008 Location: curator of the WTFbus museum

Apr 11th, 2008, 10:11 AM 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. Oh, I have lots and lots of storiesI 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.