09 January 2006

the nuts are loose in chattanooga


is it asking too much to just see one normal person during a shift in the er? i didn't think that it was, but after the 60 hours i put this past week at good ole parkridge east, i have decided that it is indeed asking too much. i consider myself to be an "average american" but i'm becoming less convinced of this on a daily basis. it would be nice to walk into an exam room and see a patient who isn't going to lie to me, has a job, and isn't completely psycho. as the title of this post implies, the majority of the patients i have seen here lately are crazy-some of them literally. i have seen a few patients with legitimate complaints and who actually weren't just there to get pain meds, but when the ratio is 1 normal person to 20 crazy ones, one tends to forget about the normal ones.
i made another patient mad this weekend because i didn't write him a prescription for percocet for his "back pain", which according to him was horrible pain- the worst he'd ever had. however, this man is telling me all this as he sits on the bed calmly without even the slightest hint of discomfort. i mean come on, if you want me to believe you even just a little bit you should probably at least pretend to be in pain. he did give me this sob story about how horrible things were in his life right now, so maybe that was his strategy to get me to give him drugs. needless to say i didn't write him any narcotics and when the nurse went to discharge him and give him a shot for his "horrible pain" he got mad and left, which was fine with me.
in other news, i joined the y today as part of my semi new years resolution to try and live healthier. i also finally got around to setting up my high speed internet this past week, and i can assure you that i will never go back to dial up. as i am know to be suffer from a lack of patience, it's very nice to have pages load quickly. so that pretty much sums up what i've been up to since my last post.

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