While We're Here

Chick comes in last night in respiratory distress on an ambulance- she's pretty sick. All stridorous and generally shitty looking. We throw all kinds of crap at her trying to avoid intubation, finally get her relatively settled on BIPAP, and I'm running around the room hanging all these different meds when the patient's husband tells me he needs to ask the doctor a question.

I ask him what the question is and tell him I may be able to answer it- a lot of people don't really understand that nurses have medical training and can therefore answer medical questions.

"It's personal", he tells me. Ruh roh. Something about your wife's care we need to know? Nope. A personal medical question, he tells me. I go ahead and explain to him that the doctor is most likely not going to give any kind of medical advice to someone who isn't a patient, but I'll let him know. ER Doc is in the next room in a procedure and I'm trying to do other stuff, so I catch up with him later and mention the patient's husband wants to talk to him.

I could tell by the look on his face I was too late. Yeah. Apparently homeboy calls poor ER Doc into the room and tells him that sometimes his penis gets red and swollen and drains stuff. He then proceeds to try and show the doctor his penis. Doctor tells him he needs to check in if he wants to be seen for that foolishness and then gets the hell out of the room, stat.

The husband wasn't in the room when I got back, but I didn't think much of it as he'd been in and out smoking for a good part of the night. Until about ten minutes later when I look up on the tracker and see his name up there. He sure did check in to get his penis looked at in fast track while we were still trying to figure out whether or not we were going to intubate his wife. Really.

Congratulations, sir, you just won the Hood Hospital prize for worst two-fer ever, beating out the gentleman who checked in with his wife who was having a CHF exacerbation because he's been walking a lot and had some blisters on his feet. Please exit the hospital and keep walking to claim your prize. It's out there somewhere, I swear.