Monday, January 30, 2012

More Fun With Coordinating Transportation

It started like so many other cases at Hood Hospital. Elderly gentleman who normally makes it around the house on an assistive device and gets his everyday stuff done with the help of his wife has a rough day and takes a spill. He's then transported to us via EMS without said assitive device, wife stays at home. Thankfully, pappy is just fine, his c spine is cleared, and he's ready to be discharged. Enter drama.
Awesome baby nurse coworker calls his son, who is listed as his emergency contact, to see if he can come down the road and pick dear old dad up from the ER. His response? "Um, I just lit a fire in the fire place, so, I can't."
You can't put some water on it or something?
"Nah."
Coworker then tries the approach of playing it tough and saying he really needs to come up here and get his dad. Yeah.
"I can be there in like, two to three days. You guys need to keep him, and like, check his blood, and his sugars, and his organs. Yeah. Yeah, you guys need to check up on his organs."
All I'm hearing at this point is my friend's end of the conversation. "Check his organs? What? What are you talking about? I'm hanging up now. Bye."
So I guess at this point he's trying to figure out with the wife whether the poor guy can go home via cab or if he needs ambulance transport. He's kind enough to put this one on speakerphone, where this 70 something year old lady totally loses her shit on him for asking if it's safe for the patient to go home via cab. At the crescendo of it all, she ends up on some crazy ass rant about how awful our hospital is and that's why they always talk bad about us on "the black folk radio station" and that's how come no one goes to Hood Hospital.
Finally we just say screw it and arrange for private ambulance transport. It's ridiculous, but at times it's really the only viable option. I know he was beyond frustrated about he amount of verbal abuse he took for just trying to do the right thing. I couldn't stop thinking about how long he'd been dealing with the whole situation and how many combined man hours our nursing staff must put towards non-medical fuckery like this. It kind of makes my head spin.

7 comments:

  1. On the plus side, you guys would have likely forgot to check "his organs and stuff" if the son hadn't reminded you. So there's that.

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  2. non-medical fuckery... the perfect term! I do NOT miss those shenanigans

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  3. Oy. I hate that part of our job so much, and in the mean time you get a new pt who needs a line/ labs/ meds. Oh and you need to mix CT contrast on your other pt. And your 4th pt is pushing the call light to go to the bathroom. So there grandpa sits, until you have the actual 10 minutes it's going to take to arrange transport

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  4. @Tigerama- Right! That's probably why they talk bad about us on the radio. Because we're negligent about checking up on people's organs. Worst ER EVER!

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  5. "Non-medical fuckery", now an important part of my daily vocabulary. Thanks!

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  6. I wanna listen to that black radio station thats hilarious. They need to bash us more b/c its not working. Had 50 in the watiing room at 2 am Monday night. At 5 am a dude gets back after waiting 6 hours b/c...."feels like I have had spaghetti stuck in my throat for 3 weeks." Discharged

    ER Doc

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  7. You mean you didn't check his organs? You gonna get sued!

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