Mean people suck

My night was filled with sewing up person after person who drank too much and did something stupid ("play-fighting with butcher knives" "drunk cactus-trimming with a machete" "falling out of moving vehicle" "riding bike down main road the wrong way wearing all black with no helmet on").

The running excitement through the shift was provided by my first patient, a twenty-something young man with pretty severe stomach pain, constipation, and vomiting for a day. The twist? He is a 450 pound twenty-something young man with pretty severe stomach pain, constipation, and vomiting for a day. We pretty desperately needed to do a CT scan and he. . . can't fit into the scanner. The surgery team actually called the zoo in the morning to find out if they had a veterinary scanner we could use. I know it should be kind of funny but the guy was just so sweet and I wanted so much to be able to treat him and it was really sad. I was so embarrassed for him and frustrated that we weren't able to give him the care he should have received. We had similar trouble with x-rays, he couldn't fit on the radiology table and his abdomen shape prevented us from getting a good view of the intestines.

Finally, the morning was capped off with an oh so emergent "back pain for two months and peeing a lot," (Yeah, she ended up waiting 15 hours in the waiting room. Yes, literally.) This turned out to be an oh so awkward case of I-may-be-pregnant-but-I'm-in-denial-so-I'm-going-to-ignore-three-months-of-not-having-my-period-and-throwing-up-every-morning-and-my-swollen-breasts-and -rapidly-enlarging-lower-abdomen-and-just-hope-it-all-goes-away-on-its-own-itis.

And of course she came in with her mother. And of course she didn't want her mother to find out. Now she has a new pregnancy and pain so we have to do an ultrasound to make sure the baby is in the uterus. So I had to keep weirdly think up legitimate reasons to ask the mom to leave the room so we could do all these exams for what the mother thinks is just some back pain. Well good luck to her.