weekend, dummies

Wow. Nights this weekend have brought in some winners. Winners with lying problems, apparently. My favorite was probably the guy who came to the ER on a stretcher covered in road rash and reeking of beer. First he lied to us about how many beers he had (seriously, I do NOT GIVE A SHIT how drunk you are, nor does anyone else but we NEED TO KNOW these things, man) I think the number started at three and went up to 6 or so as the assessment continued- whatever- but then came the inevitable question of how did this happen to you- oh, um, hit by a car. Huh? Yeah. He was crossing the street and got hit by a car and somehow that lead to tons of road rash but zero broken bones. We x rayed just about everything, irrigated his wounds and sent him home- the whole time we were trying to clean him up he kept trying to walk around the room and talk on the phone to his girlfriend, who couldn't find the ER, so he was sticking his head out of the room and yelling at people for directions- I was practically chasing him with the bottle of saline. I thought he was weird, but he wasn't my patient so I wasn't too worried about it- I found out later from the ER cops that he had been drunk and riding his motorcycle and had wrapped it around a pole but didn't want anyone to know because he had gotten a DWI a month prior. I guess he thought being honest with the nurses was going to get him another one. Everyone kept asking him if he'd been in a motorcycle wreck just based on his injuries, and he kept insisting that he had been hit by a car. Again, we don't care. Unless you injured yourself hurting someone else I could give a damn about your illegal activities.
Same story for the dumb dumb that came in the next night. I don't know if he was on anything, but came in claiming that he'd been shot by someone but he didn't know who it was. The only problem was, he had a big bullet hole in his hand with a powder burn around it, meaning it had to be at close range. The kid changed his story about 4 times, zero versions of which actually made any sense. The police and the doctor were both pretty sure that he had gone and bought a gun off the street trying to be thug and suceeded only in shooting himself in the hand with it. Well played.
As far as illegal activities, that's pretty much all we got other than the guy I ended up with from jail on warrants who came in for his "Crohn's flare up" and immediately left without being seen at the first opportunity. It's not really a valuable use of the police's time to babysit people who are in jail for traffic tickets during their whole ER stay, so if they have an emergency in jail they just let them go with EMS to the hospital and allow them to turn themselves in later. The only problem with that is that a lot of people just use it to get out of jail and bounce when no one's looking. Unfortunately for me, the only other patient I had dealt with in this situation was actually sick, so I spent a ton of time doing a full work up on this douchebag and even tryed to stick him twice, all the time while he screwed around and wiggled and did nothing conductive to a sucessful IV start. It's actually fortunate for him I couldn't do it, because otherwise the police actually would have had to go after him for leaving with IV access. I was pretty pissed that I spent the time on him, but I did learn a valuable lesson with jail patients- next time I will give them the opportunity to "get a urine sample" before I do anything else.