Emergency Room

If you get shot, stabbed, poisoned, burned, bitten, or disemboweled, or if you have a heart attack or stroke, you should go here.

If your skin itches, or you're feeling sore in your joints, or if you have any other problem that won't kill or disfigure you in less than a week if you leave it alone, just schedule an appointment with a normal doctor.

I once waited in the emergency room of the Royal Victoria Hospital for eight hours, doubled over in pain with unexplained uterine bleeding. Emergency rooms, as I found out, are frequented by a vast assortment of psychotics and senile persons, probably on unsupervised leave from the neurological ward.

One of them proceeded to tell me that I put on "a good show" and that "they" were going to stick needles in my arms, but that I was a whore anyway, so it probably wouldn't bother me.

Considering the personal and frightening nature of my injury, this casually insane comment still sticks in my mind.

As some of you know from reading my write-ups, I work in a hospital in the IS Dept. I was down in the ER one day during NASCAR week (drunks galore) in Bristol, TN, and the place was just flooded with all sorts of people from everywhere.

I tryed to stay out of the way of all the nurses while I was installing a new computer at a nurses desk, but it was near impossible. When I finally got everything unloaded and hooked up, I sat down and was finishing setting up the computer. I just happened to glance up at the Ambulance doors and saw a drunk stumbling through the automatic doors. The next thing I know, I see him face plant right in between the doors. I tryed to call a nurse to drag his drunk ass out of the way, but it was so busy, no one heard me.

Then... it got worse, the automatic doors started to close. They shut right on the sides of his head.

And the bad part was... when they hit his head, he'd shake and open the doors again. And the humiliating process happened again. It proceeded to happen about 5 or 6 times before I got someone's attention.

I felt so bad that I couldn't help him since I'm not allowed to get near patients, but it sure did lighten the mood in the ER for the next week. Not to mention it set a speed record for a story going around the hospital.