Sunday, May 6, 2007

Status Dramaticus

1915 Thursday night: 23 year old female presents with abdominal pain. Moaning, thrashing around in the wheelchair, hyperventilating. "Honey, you need to slow down your breathing." "I can't! The pain! Can't you get me something for the pain?" Fast forward 6 hours. Patient discharged without narcotics script due to the fact that ALL OF HER TESTS WERE DEAD NORMAL. Labs, CT, Xrays, everything. She did, however, receive enough Dialudid to knock me unconscious for a month.

0630 Friday morning: 23 year old female presents with abdominal pain. Moaning, thrashing around in the wheelchair, hyperventilating. Yup. Same girl. "Honey, you need to slow down your breathing." "I can't! The pain! They didn't do anything to fix the pain! Can't you get me something for the pain?" Fast forward 3 hours. Patient discharged again, because EVERYTHING IS STILL DEAD NORMAL!

0130 Saturday morning: 23 year old female presents with abdominal pain. Walks in, moaning, leaning against the check in counter, hyperventilating. Hey, we've done this before, haven't we? Yup. Maybe third time's a charm. "Honey, you need to slow down your breathing." "Stop telling me that! You're always telling me that! Can't you understand I'm in pain?" I give up. Fast forward 4 hours. Patient is stoned and pain free, all of her tests are STILL dead normal, and she's going home again. This time she's got a script for Lortab.

Moral of the story? If at first you don't succeed, try, try again!

6 comments:

scalpel said...

Now, onto the next ER!

Anonymous said...

*snicker* I love your blog. Please keep writing.

Anonymous said...

scalpel-what do you think she was doing in between her visits to monkeygirl? Bet she has the rotation down pat.

SeaSpray said...

Status dramaticus! I LOVE it! :)

mielikki said...

Its always fun when those patients forget their day planners. Opening it up, you can see how carefully they note which ED they went to, and who gave them what. . .

ERnursey said...

And another on firmly on the Dilaudid/Lortab wagon.