Friday, May 18, 2007

Highly Emergent UTI

If your UTI is so bad that you have to call 9-1-1 and have an ambulance bring you to our fine ER, and then when you get here and we stick your sorry ass out in triage because the actually SICK PEOPLE are filling up all the ER beds, and you call your mommy who lives over 2000 miles away so that she can complain loudly and abusively over the phone to the triage nurse about how sick her poor daughter is, and you sit in the lobby and make a general PITA of yourself for 2 hours,

don't be surprised if we wait until you storm out the door to "go to another damn ER" to call your name to be seen.

Sometimes "LWBS" is just all we want to chart.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oooh, I once had the /worst/ UTI that developed after I had a foley taken out. It had totally progressed past the "burning when I urinate" stage to the "pain when I sit, stand, move, breathe, exist" stage.

I don't remember what happened 'tho. Hmm.

Nurse K said...

We had the same person in our ER a couple of days ago, a 24 year old girl who had extensive knowledge of various narcotics. She was so abusive and screaming/cussing with her UTI that I stuck security on her. And she was already in a ROOM. She was angry that we weren't giving her her narcotic cocktail of choice. More drama ensued when her abusive boyfriend showed up and started cussing at us too. The fast, young doctor who hasn't cussed but once in the year that I worked with him even told him to "get out of the nurse's station" in a strong, authoritative voice. It was awesome.

Nurse K said...

I've had UTIs too, a lovely intermittent side-effect of diabetes, and it's called URISTAT/pyridium and MinuteClinic/urgent care. You don't need IV morphine for UTIs unless you're a drug addict, whereby you need narcotics for a sniffle or anything else you present to an ER for. A pyelonephritis could require narcotics, but screaming and cussing is never necessary regardless.

Miranda5 said...

Haven't these people ever heard "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar"? Or is that another disappearing life-lesson?

Krymanitly.

ERnursey said...

I had a horrible bout of pyelonephritis once. I drove myself to the urgent care (although I had to stop twice to puke!) They offered me vicodin which I refused, all I wanted was an antibiotic, my bed and lots of motrin. Never, ever, ever would have thought to call an ambulance for God's sake.

Catherine said...

Someone would actually call an ambulance for that?