Graveyard Humor

Me: Hi, this is Hobbes calling from [Hospital ER]. I'm calling for the medical examiner.

Dispatcher: Another one bites the dust, huh?

Me: Yeah, we're just knocking 'em dead over here.

Who said there are no stupid questions?

That person has obviously never worked in an ER. Or, perhaps, never spoken to a human being.

I have a new candidate for dumbest question ever asked.

I was giving report to an EMT who was transporting a patient of mine back to her nursing home. I was explaining to him that she had been sent to us for fever and tachycardia, and we had diagnosed her with a urinary tract infection. Her nurse had given her Tylenol before she'd left the other facility, and she had been afebrile the entire time with us.

The EMT asked, "Is she usually afebrile, on a daily basis?"

I stared at him for a moment, and then just said, "Yes."

Really, what other answer is there?

Someday I should learn to keep my mouth shut.

I have tattoos. For the most part, they are hidden when I'm at work. But there is one which, depending on the cut of the scrubs I'm wearing, occasionally peeks out a bit. This has never been an issue.

And then there was this woman.

If she had actually been sick, maybe I would have given her the benefit of the doubt. But there was nothing actually wrong with her to begin with, and she had already been obnoxious in more than one way prior to this.

And then she saw my tattoo. And she said to me, ANGRILY, as if she were personally offended, "WHY do you have to have tattoos? I HATE them."

Without even thinking, I immediately replied, "I promise never to make you get one."

If I get fired and never update again, now you know why.

'Tis the season!

It all started with a morbidly obese woman. I will never understand how a person allows him/herself to get to be that fat, but unfortunately we see a lot of it. So she was being admitted, and we were moving her from the ER stretcher (which she really didn't fit on anyway) to what is known as a Big Boy Bed. There were about six of us there to accomplish this.

As we were turning her to get the lifting pad out from underneath her, all of a sudden I caught the facial expression of the tech standing across from me, about to burst out laughing.

She held up an icicle-shaped Christmas tree ornament.

It had been stuck in the woman's back fat.

We almost had to leave the room because the two of us were silently cracking up. We couldn't look at each other, and I had to keep turning my face away from the bed as we got the woman repositioned so that no one would see that I was losing it.

Seriously.

A Christmas tree ornament.

Of all the things I have found in people's fat folds (the most digusting one being a moldy half sandwich), I do believe that this one was the funniest. And so timely!

Merry Christmas!

I know some people consider the ED a turn-on...

I am so glad that this did not actually happen to me.

A well-known drug-seeking regular of ours was in the department for a possible overdose, as per usual. Her nurse (who happened to be male, which isn't really relevant except that it gives the story just that little extra something) told her that she needed to provide a urine sample. Naturally, she said she couldn't. He then told her that if she could not provide one, we would need to use a catheter to get one.

When he came back with the catheter, he found her spread-eagle on the bed, naked, masturbating.

What did he do next? Probably the only thing one can do in that situation: turned around and walked out.

The entire department has been teasing him about it for a good week now.

Overheard from Dispatch

The original EMS call was for a "bug bite."

"Update from 911: 54-year-old female with a bug bite. Believes the bug flew into her ear, and now they're concerned because they can't find it."

It's eating your brain, lady. Or would be, if you had one.

You do know there's a difference, right?

The ambulance had brought in a young woman whose initial complaint was nausea and vomiting. Apparently, on the way across the parking lot, she decided that she also had chest pain. She probably thought that it would get her into a room that much more quickly; in reality, it just meant that instead of the cushy private room with a TV that she would have gotten, she ended up in a noisy cardiac bay with a mere curtain. Her loss.

As I was getting her settled in and hooked up to the monitor, I told her, "I'm going to put some stickers on your chest."

She replied, "Yeah, they did that in the cab, too."

I said, "That was an ambulance you were in."