What was the MOST ridiculous thing a patient came to the ER for?

I hope you gave her a note to miss work....

This happened a couple of weeks ago... homeless woman (or really poor hygiene) comes in by EMS because she had hid money, no joke, in her vagina on new years eve and she wanted us to get it out so she could spend it now. i wonder if she thought it would gain interest in there? lol

After patients walk in or come by EMS we have an offload area/room right next to triage. We call a doc in for an RME (rapid medical exam). Usually they do 3 or 4 of these at once. They order basic stuff and decide if the patient is stable enough to go back into the waiting room pending labs/tests or needs immediate bedding. The hangnail guy would have been discharged immediately with our RME. Someone with abdominal pain, for example who is stable would be given a vomit bag, told to go the waiting room and not eat or drink anything and wait for tests. Lab, etc would then go out into the waiting room and grab them, bring them in for draws, etc. then back out the the waiting room. We have patients who never see the inside of the ER. Its fairly efficient. We have an RN and security stationed in the waiting room to keep an eye on people.

This submission reminded me of an experience my mom had when I was about 6 weeks old and she was on maternity leave. She received a frantic phone call from the State Police asking if she could please go with them on an emergency call since they couldn't track down anyone else (by law, it had to be a woman)
to go on such short notice since it was the week of Christmas. She was a young attorney and, while she had no medical experience, she was an officer of the court. The police, my mom, and a young physician traveled to the remote mountain top where the little old lady was. They found her living in an unheated shack, no electricity or running water, lying on a bare, stained grey mattress. When the men tried to lift her up, they discovered the mattress ticking had grown into an open and festering decubitus on her sacrum. There she lay, trapped, in her own filth. She went to the ER mattress and all, where because of the holiday, they were shorthanded and my mom ended up helping clean her up and documenting findings. She had a wad of ancient bills stuffed in her vagina, more under one breast, a dried out biscuit under the other breast, and what had been a slice of bread, between her thigh and body. The mattress had to be debrided, as though it had been flesh, in the OR. I don't think my mom ever totally recovered from that experience although she did help prosecute the son and his wife. Not ridiculous perhaps, but horrible and inhumane. She deserves to be remembered for her endurance.

Kathy
sharpeimom

87 year old man ”I broke off a crayon off in my pee hole”
It seems that older men like to do this because I have seen a lot of weird things used.

There actually exists a device for female urinary incontinence that looks like a plastic matchstick with a base on it. ouch

Busy ER night. At the time of this story we had rotating ER of the night. 87 yo lady - very tiny too I might add came in by ambulance for chest pain. She had the standard chest pain work up. We were so full that we pulled her stretcher close to the nurses desk so that we could monitor her cardiac rate. I noticed that the rate would jump very high and gradually slow down to normal. This happened every time she pulled the sheet up over her head. I finally went over and pulled the sheet down and there on the bed were several lines of cocaine. 87 and doing cocaine????? No wonder she had chest pain. You should have seen her son when he found out his mother was a cocaine addict - he was a member of the DA's office.