Published Nov 1, 2017
jodispamodi
230 Posts
I'm feeling a bit down today so thought I'd look for some humor. So what is the funniest thing a doctor has said to you?
I had a patient with bradycardia and low BP, and I paged the team, intern called back and I said the patient's hr was 48 and irregular when I listened apically. She said "I don't know what that means but I'll come over to assess." When she came to the floor she hunted me down and said "I looked it up and I can't find it. What does apically mean?" I told her it meant I listened to his heart with my stethoscope" She was like, "oh you mean apical"
(apically is a word isnt it?,lol)
Hygiene Queen
2,232 Posts
Long time ago, we had a patient named Faith. She was difficult, demanding and manipulative. The doc was wore out and aggravated by her antics. He was sitting at the nurse's station with me, when this patient found him and gave him another good round of ranting and raving. After she left, the doc looks at me, defeated, and sighs, "If she's Faith then I don't want it. I hereby declare myself an atheist".
Had another doc who was in a similar position. His patient was paranoid, angry, and demanding every test under the sun to rule out an unlikely problem that had already been ruled out.
I was with him in the patient's room as she went on another tangent. She went on and on and on, yelling, refusing assessment, and becoming hysterical. She ends with, "I just don't want to die". Suddenly, this classy and kind doc just lost it. He stiffened up and said sternly, "DIE? You're not going to DIE! You know who's going to DIE? Hygiene Queen and I are going to DIE before you do! You're killing us!"
I had never seen nor heard of this man losing his temper, but I was torn. One bit of me knew it was a terrible thing to say. The other bit of me wanted to give him a high-five.
T-Bird78
1,007 Posts
One of my docs was performing an Epley maneuver on a pt. Doc uses a small, battery-powered massager to move the crystals in the inner ear. She yelled down the hall to the nurse's station "I need the vibrator in here!" And realized what she'd said. We all cracked up laughing and even the pt was laughing. She turned bright red and apologized. She now has a different name for the apparatus. LOL.
Ambersmom, BSN, RN
189 Posts
that made me lol.
funny,
Lady_Leijing, BSN
71 Posts
We had a patient that swallowed his glass eye. The surgeon that retrieved said eye with a scope set a picture from the scope down next to me on the desk and commented "does this stomach look surprised to you?". The glass eye was iris-side up in the mucosa and it did look very surprised like that.
SentinelTruth
55 Posts
A facility Doctor told my Unit Manager I needed an IV of Xanax while I worked.
elijahvegas, ASN, RN, EMT-P
508 Posts
took my girlfriend to see a doctor, i was still in my paramedic uniform, so maybe that put her on the defensive..or she was a just plain dolt, i couldn't tell you.
her diagnosis was that my girlfriend was constipated. i said "with all due respect, i dont think thats right." she goes on and on about how she read the xray herself, and that she knows best.
then after that, she told me i cant be in the room while she talks to my girlfriend because it would be an EMTALA violation...
....
.....
p.s. i took my girlfriend to see another doctor, turns out she had endometriosis.
heavy sigh
I would have loved to have seen that picture,lol.
I remembered this from awhile back. My mother was in the hospital, my sister and I were both paramedics and my mother's doc knew it, my sister was also a smoker(still is, sigh). So my sister had left the room to go outside for a cigarette break, she was standing not far from the front doors when moms doctor came out. Doctor sees my sister smoking (he knows she works in healthcare) and goes over to her and says "You don't practice what you preach", my sister responds "I don't preach"
I guess technically that comes under funniest thing my sister has said.
K_NM_rn
7 Posts
One of our favorite night docs came up to our med-surg unit one night and asked a group of us if we wanted to have a beer after work. He asked, deadpan, "Do you like Colona?" We were like, "Corona?" And he said, "No, Colona," and showed us a picture of an x-ray of a pt in the ED with an unopened beer bottle stuck up his bum. It was so funny to us because this doc was usually so stoic and serious!
meanmaryjean, DNP, RN
7,899 Posts
Used to work with a gastroenterologist who was not adverse to disimpacting patients (and cleaning up) himself. I loved that man.
One day he was in the nurses' station, and another nurse walked in exasperated at the number of times she had cleaned up one particular patient that shift. She said "I've HAD IT with these people and their poop problems!"
To which he replied, "Never talk bad about poop. It's put my three kids through college."