Things I learned from my patients

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I hate you forever because I'm unable to stop reading this thread you posted about.

However, on page 16, lies this gem:

If you are a lieutenant colonel and you're going to shove your pager (his military issued pager complete with the clip holder thing) up your ass, and need to go to a hospital to have it removed, a few pointers:
a. Don't go to a military hospital
b. If you are going to go to a military hospital, remember not to go to the one on the base you work at.
c. The respiratory therapist (me) shouldn't be asking you for the pager number, not even "because we have to have the number for the report."
d. Don't be surprised when the ER staff amuses themselves for several hours while waiting on an OR to become available, by paging you repeatedly and watching you jump.
 

Dave

Staff member
I know those were all real but I still have a hard time believing some of them, you know?
 
There is real meaning behind the phrase "Truth is stranger than fiction".

Fiction, for it to be believable, is actually pretty limited. Truth, however, can be crazy because it's not bound by our own imagination.
 
My brother is a nurse at the local ER. None of these came as any surprise to him and some of his own personal experiences were faaaar beyond what was written there.
 

Green_Lantern

Staff member
Some more small gems:

If you are a 500-pound female and want to have sex, you can have YOUR SISTER hold your folds of abdominal fat up out of the way while your husband does the job...

A 500 pound woman came into the ER and found out she was pregnant. When the doctor asked how she was able to even have sex, she casually replied, "Oh my sister holds up my belly for me." (Rural Arkansas).

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Please don't tell me that your brother is the baby daddy.\

Just don't. The paperwork is horrendous.

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If your seventy year old wife has been constipated for longer than you remember, do not use the garden hose on high pressure every morning for 5 years as an enema. When you bring her into hospital with a rectum wide enough to fit a basketball in, you will be asked some tough questions by attending medicos.

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If you steal your momma's car, get in a police chase, and then flip and wreck said car...you'd better be more afraid of your momma than you are of the police.

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If you happen to have a condition-dependent rash, it would help to know your condition for me to even have a shot at guessing the rash.

Like that third trimester pregnancy... you know, why you keep having weird "gas" pains. And no period for, like, 8 months.

(She was a nice enough gal, just didn't put two and two together. Once we figured out she was not only pregnant, but very pregnant, the pruritic and urticarial plaques and papules made a lot more sense.)

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Don't dangle from a tree limb with one hand and try to use a chainsaw to, again one handed, cut the limb.
 
Speaking of stranger than fiction, I knew a chap who shot himself in the dick with a 22 air rifle. Same person also burned his backside another time trying to ignite a fart!
 
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