The ER Follies

Written by Allison Aubin

The ER can be a good place to find people who have had a “Bad Idea” and then committed it. Maybe it was a science experiment that should have remained on paper or that “what if” scenario that should have remained a wistful thought. From the funny to the cute, to the downright odd, here are some stories that popped up in emergency rooms around Bakersfield.

Dr. Kevin Schmidt, DO, with San Joaquin Community Hospital, has seen a lot of odd ER stories end the same way: with a visit to the psych ward.

Men In Black

A man came in very panicked and said he was being followed. He asked if anyone knew the men in dark suits and sunglasses, so I said, “like the men in black?” He jumped on that. The men in black! He said they had been following him for about three weeks. They were at the mall, in the grocery store, in a car outside his house. We got him checked into the psych ward.

A few hours later, a couple of men in dark suits came in and showed us a picture of the guy. They asked if we had seen him. It turned out they were from the Secret Service and he had been making threats, so they were watching him closely. I asked how long they had been following him around. They said “about three weeks now.”

Animal Welfare

I had a guy call the ER once, sounding very out of breath. He said he couldn’t breathe, gasping all the while. I asked if he used supplemental oxygen and he said “yes, two liters per dog.” I couldn’t quite understand, so I told him to call 911. The paramedics came into the ER later, laughing. One of them told me that the guy had locked himself in the basement and when they finally got the door open, there was a mass of oxygen tanks on the ground. The air saturation was about 100 percent oxygen and the guy was gasping because he was hyperventilating (he had too much oxygen).

That wasn’t the strangest part.

The strangest part was that he decided that since he couldn’t breathe, his dog must be in trouble, too. The paramedics found the dog on the floor with its paws taped together and an oxygen tube taped to its nose. The canister feeding the oxygen to the dog was two liters.

Dr. Rick McPheeters, chairman of emergency medicine at Kern Medical Center, has collected more than one funny story in his 15 years at the hospital.

Resident With a Good Heart

Some years ago, a kid in his late teens was brought in with a snake bite.

His friends thought it was a rattlesnake and caught the snake to be properly identified. It was a small rattler and was kept in a box until animal control could pick it up. One of the residents couldn’t stand the thought of the snake being put down and put the box in his car with the intention of releasing the animal into the hills after his shift. He got off shift and went out to his car. That’s when he noticed the box was open, and the snake was nowhere to be found. Rather than slide into a car with a potentially dangerous and disgruntled animal, he searched for two hours before giving up and driving home. The next day he drove all the way to L.A. with a little rattlesnake somewhere in his car. He never did find the snake.

Practice Babies

One day, a couple of teenagers came in; both were 18 and had just been married. I forget what the complaint was, but they found out in the course of lab tests that she was pregnant. So while the lab ran more tests related to their complaint, the couple waited in a small room. The resident went to check on the results of the tests and when he came back to speak to them he noticed a shopping bag with eyes peering out of the top. He thought they would be leaving soon so he didn’t say anything about hospital policy and cats, but when he returned a second time with the test results, the bag had tipped over and there were now four little kittens running around the room. He asked the couple what was going on and the man said, “We saw these kittens outside with no mother and we thought we would take them home, to practice raising these babies before we had one of our own.”

Anita Patel, RN, with Mercy Hospital on Truxtun, knows creative thinking can help keep a patient safe, even if it means going to some lengths to construct a fantasy.

The ‘Cigarettes’

We had a patient who was highly intoxicated with alcohol, and weighed maybe 100 pounds, soaking wet. Unfortunately, he kept getting out of bed and coming by the nurses’ station because he wanted to go outside and smoke a cigarette. He had a very unsteady gait and we were afraid he would fall and hurt himself, but I didn’t want to tie him to his bed. To keep him in bed, I cut a drinking straw in half and took a pulse monitor—a small device with an infrared light on one end— and attached it to a sticky bandaid-like patch. Then I attached that to his finger. I told him, “There’s your cigarette,” pointing to the straw in one hand, “and there’s your lighter,” pointing to the light attached to his finger. I gave him a plastic cup for an ashtray and he was perfectly content to stay in bed for the rest of the day, provided I replaced his “cigarettes.”

Dr. Dan Erickson, also with San Joaquin Community Hospital, has seen some interesting x-rays in his five years as an ER physician. More interesting than the x-rays can be the stories some people come up with to explain them.

You Hid What Where?

We had an inmate brought in by the cops for foreign body removal but I didn’t do an x-ray right away. As I performed the exam, I felt something hard and sharp poke me. I took my hand out right away and then we took the x-ray. The object turned out to be a large syringe! Luckily it was still capped. It turned out that when the inmate had heard the police coming, he decided to hide his drug paraphernalia in his rear end. We got it out with no problem.

Sherry Stone, RN, a supervisor with Mercy Hospital Southwest said that life in the ER is very stressful and jokes they occasionally play on one another “help relieve the stress in the department.”

The Heart ‘Patient’

We had a day when we weren’t too busy and decided to do some stress relief. We had an ambulance stationed outside the hospital in case of emergency so we told the driver to turn on the siren like they were bringing in a patient with a heart problem. We had one of the nurses hop up on a gurney and we put a blanket over her and began doing CPR. When one of the doctors came in to take over, she sat up! The prank scared the doctors and definitely relieved several nurses’ stress.

Jennifer Cook, RN, MSN, has been a nurse for 12 years and works with Bakersfield Memorial Hospital. She said, “The ER is very much life or death,” so the nurses need to decompress.

FrankenNurse

After a particularly difficult patient death, the nurse assigned to the room entered to prepare it for the next patient, working around the body bag on the bed. Unbeknownst to her, the other nurses had already removed the body, had placed a new body bag on the bed, and helped one of their co-workers climb inside. The nurse assigned to the room approached the body bag and began to unzip it—when the nurse inside sat up!

The first nurse went flying out of the room and Cook says though the prank happened years ago, they still tell the story today when they need a good laugh.

After reading those stories, hopefully we’ve all had one.

Article appeared in our 26-5 Issue - December 2009