rph3664

After 9/11, a pathologist opened a body bag and removed a bone with some flesh attached - and started laughing, because it was a pork chop. One of the other pathologists said, "Last week, everyone lined up and saluted a leg of lamb."

I don't know if this was a nurse and never did find out exactly who it was, but at my old hospital, an employee in the child psych unit told her family over the dinner table that a neighborhood child was on the unit, and the next day, the kids went to school and told all their classmates about it. What happened to said employee? She was told not to do it again. I also read in a pharmacy trade magazine about a Wal-Mart pharmacist who was blatantly forging C-II prescriptions, and received the same "punishment".

Here's another angle on ER abuse. I have a relative who got divorced some years back, and her ex-husband had to pay the kids' medical bills. You can probably guess what she did - doctors' appointments almost every day, trips to the ER if there wasn't anything going on during the weekend, just to soak him. It finally stopped when the kids told her that they didn't want to spend their free time in waiting rooms. This was a situation where neither parent should have had custody, and there was a stretch where I honestly believe those kids would have been better off in foster care. Someone on another board said, "Are you aware that if a child wasn't sexually abused when they went into foster care, they will be by the time they get out?" and I replied, "Yes, I am, and they STILL would have been better off." Speaking of which, it wouldn't have surprised me if she tried to play that card as well. Would he have done it? Of course, I never lived with him, but truthfully, even if he was a pedophile, he wasn't interested enough in the kids to do anything like that either.

I live in the Midwest (meth capital, as you probably all know) and my local newspaper recently did a big story about the burn unit in that city. The story said that some hospitals have had to close their burn units because the entire hospital was in danger of financial collapse just from all the uninsured people who blew themselves up in meth lab explosions. And this unit assumes that all patients are from a meth lab unless they can prove otherwise (paramedics brought them in from a job site, that kind of thing). Among other things, they always get an eye wash because they've seen a few cases of people who weren't that badly burned but ended up blind, and didn't have to be that way. NatGeo has a show about meth that airs periodically, and they interviewed the director of the burn unit at Vanderbilt University Hospital in Tennessee. He said that this hospital provides $300 million in charity care every year just to their meth lab explosion patients. There was an implication between the lines of both stories that if it was up to them, meth lab explosion people would get comfort care and nothing else, and whether people like this should even get aggressive treatment, whether they are insured or not, is a medical ethicist's nightmare. I've read "Methland", and I recognized enough factual errors in the book to make the entire thing suspect.

It doesn't matter where you work, or what you're doing, pretty much every place has someone who is immune from disciplinary action.

Many years ago, one of my friends was told this.......about her 14-year-old son. Even worse? Several women (all women; no men said this) told her ex-husband that he was probably glad his son died because he wasn't going to have to pay child support for him any more! How incredibly cruel, especially because the boy essentially died in his arms.

What's your room charge, like, $500 a day or what? Awfully expensive cable. Hope he ended up in jail. At the time, I was living in the storm's path (my town got more snow in that storm than we usually got in a whole season) and there was a story on the news about parades of pregnant women checking into motels in case they went into labor during this time.

I once saw an order on such a patient who needed to be cathed, and they nurses couldn't find his member either, so they called in a urologist and he had to use a lady partsl speculum to expose it.

I know this is a really old thread being revived, but I believe that the reason some women do this is because they believe they can get an abortion at the ER if they are indeed pregnant.

Thanks. I'll have to remember that.

I can safely assume that it worked - permanently?

Most people who are not diabetic, or do not work in health care, would not know about sliding scale monitoring, or the details involved.

He was a type I with this kind of attitude, and lived to be 26? He must have had the consistution of Keith Richards. Actually, health care professionals with type II diabetes are probably the most noncompliant people on earth.

there are a lot of women who won't go to male doctors. lots of men are reluctant to see women doctors too, especially regarding.......that....... while this isn't an er story, there is a female urologist in my region who specializes in treating erectile dysfunction. really.

That's correct; when a person is a tissue donor, this is done to retain the body's shape if it's going to be viewed. They also stuff the eye sockets (I'm not sure with what) when corneas are donated, because they remove the entire eyeball. Trust me, it's nothing compared to embalming and other preparations done by morticians.